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RTD malaria
Helping health providers in underserved areas to rapidly diagnose malaria


Role Interaction Designer
Duration 2 days in May 2019
Client Ubicomp lab
Process Design sprint; Stakeholder feedback; User survey; Competitive analysis


The Ubiquitous Computing laboratory at the University of Washington wanted to improve a malaria assessment mobile application, designed for image capture and interpretation of rapid diagnostic test results using machine learning techniques.

The current version of the application is being tested in the field in Mali. It was co-designed by the UbiComp lab, Muso Health, and Medic Mobile with financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The entire project is open-source, and can be found on this Github repository. See an overview of the existing application below:





I was excited about participating in this project and asked to meet with the team. The morning before the meeting, I had some time available and mocked an application on Sketch and Principle to show some of my visual design and interaction design ideas for the app. See this pilot version of the application below.





The project team was excited with the prototype and my possible contributions to the project. However, we noticed some drawbacks that should be addressed:

  • Visual language
Font sizes and certain design elements such as icons were too small
There wasn’t enough contrast in the color palette
  • Phone proportion and navigation patterns
The phones used by healthcare providers in Africa are most often Android
  • Too many steps and options on each screen


I then talked to a small group of clinicians and friends who design experiences in the healthcare industry. We agreed that the 3 issues listed above could be improved by:

  • Doing a competitive analysis to learn more about patterns in health apps’ visual language
  • Exploring interaction patterns to make input easier and faster for healthcare providers


Based on the expert feedback and a competitive analysis, I designed another application with larger fonts and buttons, and a mix of accent bright colors with whites and grays, which is a common combo in health applications.






A few parts of the interactive prototype that I made to showcase the app.




Conclusion


This was a quick and scrappy project! Although these iterations were finished in about 2 days, I followed a user-centric approach to the best of my ability. See the overall process below.





This project made me think more deeply about the decades-long discussion on if designers should learn how to code. I can code front-end, but haven’t ventured into Machine Learning yet, which was necessary to implement the camera features on this application. How will Artificial Intelligence impact the work of interaction designers? I’m excited to find out!
“I just stumbled across your blog post about your design sprint for the Ubicomp lab--cool work! ”

Isaac Holeman
Founder of Medic Mobile, an NGO making open source software for healthcare in hard-to-reach communities.




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