For this project, my role was to focus on User Experience and information gathering. I focused on creating a prototype in Sketch that I could then translate into XML.
For this project, I not only worked on UX, but also wrote Android XML to create a usable front end for the application.
According to Diabetes.org, 9.4% of Americans suffer from some kind of diabetes. Diabetes is the seventh highest leading cause of deaths in Americans. People who suffer from diabetes must monitor their glucose levels, in order to ensure that they remain in a safe range.
We want to create a unified platform for managing a user’s blood glucose. By combining tracking of glucose levels from a monitor with tracking of food intake, we can find patterns in blood sugar levels that help us identify problematic foods that drastically influence a user’s blood sugar. Furthermore, we can help users monitor and visualize their blood sugar over time in order to better manage their blood sugar without the use of insulin.
To give a good idea of the development process, I broke the main parts of our application into 4 seperate sub-application. Each sub-application plays a critical role in the application as a whole. For this project, the application that pertain to this design project with respect to UX would be Sketch.
Sketch is a vector based editing tool that is used primarily for design work and prototyping. For this project, I used Sketch to create a basic prototype of the main page as well as the glucose graph.
Unlike working on a solo project, team projects require intense communication between team members to avoid design conflicts before starting the high fidelity prototype. Therefore, we all contributed to working on a simple sketch with the main pages of the application drawn out.
The Smart Glucose application is split up into 4 distinct screens: the main menu, nutrition, historical data graph, and an external results page. When the Smart Glucose application is first opened, the main menu is immediately displayed, with three distinct icons that link to the respective sections.
From the main menu, the user can select the food icon in order to switch to the nutrition section. This is the section of the app where the user can input the type of food currently being eaten to add to the current model in planning how their blood glucose level should change in the future. To do this, the user can select the text box and type in the name of the food that they are eating which is connected to the Nutritionix database. Once the food is selected from the textbox, the food data is then immediately added to the predicted blood glucose level, and the user can leave the page
Back on the main menu, the user is able to select the graph icon to view their past historical data with the Dexcom API. From here, the user’s past glucose data from the last 24 hours is displayed to the user alongside recommended safety blood sugar levels. These values are based on the blood glucose data from the top of the hour in the past 24 hour window from the current time. A sample set of data from a test user can be seen in the picture below.
Much everyday knowledge is in the world, not in the head, so visibility is one of the most important aspects in design. Ideally, natural clues are made visible, requiring no conscious thought. This application should be able to speak for itself. However, we did not want to overcomplicate our application with multiple buttons and different controls.
Since this application is in constant communication with the user, making it a mobile application was the most obvious choice. However, there are some parts of our application that also can use an external web page that a regular mobile phone could not display as well.