MyBeam: A Chronic Pain Management App
Responsibilities: Project Lead, Art Direction, Brand Design, UX Research, Interaction & Visual UI Design
Completed while at Pivot Design Group.
NeuPath Pain & Spine Clinics across Canada were looking for a way to digitize their in-person clinic and support group experience. By offering evidence-based pain management techniques and recommendations in an app format, they were better able to speak to and support their existing clients in a virtual setting.
Research Approach
The app design involved several rounds of research and design:
Landscape Review: to identify other similar apps and pain management programs
User Interviews: with patients, care providers, funders, and family doctors to inform the user personas
User Personas: to outline the motivations, behaviours, needs, and scenarios of use of key users
Design Solution
Considerable time was spent developing and designing for buckets of content to allow the app to be robust and comprehensive to its users. Much of the design process became about editing content down so that it could be managed by users in “bite-sized” chunks of content that would be presented to the user each day in the form of a quiz. Each quiz followed a daily lesson. These lessons fed into a gamification system to motivate users to continue to use the app to manage and maintain their chronic pain. The design phase consisted of these deliverables:
Interaction Design: information architecture and wireframing to iterate through task flows and organize and strategize content
Naming & Brand Design: codesign sessions, naming research, logo design and colour palette iterations along with typographic explorations to come up with the best possible brand identity for the chronic pain companion app
Visual UI Design & Illustration: to bring the brand values and content to life; to create and underline a joyful experience especially to users suffering from chronic pain
