Making managing Osteoporosis easier

Role: UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping

Duration: January - March, 2023

About Osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a common bone disease that occurs when the body loses too much bone, makes too little bone, or both. This leads to weak and brittle bones that are more likely to fracture or break. Osteoporosis affects both men and women, but it is more common in women, particularly those who are postmenopausal.

Here are some relevant statistics about osteoporosis:

According to the International Osteoporosis Foundation, worldwide, one in three women over the age of 50 will experience osteoporotic fractures, as will one in five men over the age of 50.
In the United States, approximately 10 million people have osteoporosis, and another 44 million have low bone density, which puts them at risk of developing the disease.
In the US, it is estimated that osteoporosis is responsible for more than 2 million fractures each year, and the estimated cost of osteoporosis-related fractures is $19 billion annually.

The Client

Amgen is a multinational biopharmaceutical company that specializes in the development and production of drugs for the treatment of various illnesses, including osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a bone disease that affects millions of people worldwide and is characterized by the loss of bone density, which leads to an increased risk of fractures. Amgen recently approached us to design a mobile application that would help patients manage their osteoporosis and provide information about their drug Evenity. In this case study, we will discuss the UX design process that we undertook to design an effective and user-friendly osteoporosis management app.

Objective & Key features

Research

Our first step was to conduct research to understand the needs of osteoporosis patients and how they currently manage their condition. We conducted user interviews with osteoporosis patients and reviewed existing apps that were designed to manage the disease. We found that existing apps lacked a user-friendly interface and did not provide enough information about the disease and its treatment. We also discovered that patients had difficulty remembering when to take their medication and keeping track of their appointments with their healthcare provider.

Interviews

Our qualitative research was mainly guided interviews with a pool of 23 patients and 4 doctors from Singapore, Vietnam and Philippines, provided to us by the team at Amgen. Here are some of the questions we asked the patients and caretakers:

Actionable insights

Patients feel helpless after diagnosis
Patients struggle managing appointments
Patients find adherence really hard
Doctors find it difficult to manage conversations
Not every symptom needs an appointment

The condition lifecycle and pain points

After talking to patients, we understood how their lives progress after getting diagnosed:

Mid-fi testing

Since this was a shorter project we had to jump directly to mid fidelity testing, here are some tests we ran.

Onboarding

We wanted to test a converstational interface for onboarding as most of our patients were older and heavy users of messaging apps.

Scheduling

Here, we wanted to test a more complex UI by introducting a calendar interface but testing showed that this didn't work really well. So we reverted to a list.

Home

Since the home screen would be the most important in terms of retention we got a lot of good feedback that we could act on.

Iterating...

Updated flow

Final product

Easy onboarding

Appointment management

Home

The impact

Key learnings

Iterative research: This was the first project I was able to conduct a full research sprint, and it paid off!

Remote collaboration: We were collaborating with stakeholders from different countries / cultures

Prototyping full experiences: Since we didn’t have time for a proper handoff, this was crucial!

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