Olive

Understanding the market

Olive’s differentiation

MyChart’s market position is sufficiently strong that direct competition is not feasible. There is, however, an opportunity to lean upon MyChart’s strong position and leverage its 160 million users as Olive’s target user base (MyChart, “Homepage”).

Olive could provide user value as a product which subsumes wearable data, tracks wellbeing metrics, such as fitness, diet, mood, and mental health symptoms, and interfaces easily with MyChart to seamlessly import these metrics.

Understanding the user

To understand Olive’s target audience, MyChart users, and to identify user problems Olive would need to solve, I conducted a survey and interviews.

My user research objectives were:

• Identify which health tech platforms users use, how they interact with these platforms and if participants have any unmet needs or pain points with their current health tech platforms.
• Identify user attitudes towards health data protection and consumer tech policy, and their degree of trust in their health tech platforms.

What users want

Integration

• Users want a centralization of cross-provider and provider-patient communication.
• Users want to aggregate all of their health, fitness, wellbeing, and medical data.

Provider communication

• Users want to communicate to their providers for non-urgent matters and send pre-appointment messages to their providers.

Understand, analyze, and control their data

• Users want to automatically track their health, fitness, wellbeing, and medical data over time and to observe trends through data visualizations.
• Users are willing to broadly share their data with their healthcare providers, but still want to be selective for more sensitive data.
• Users consider mental health and emotional state data more sensitive than fitness data.
• Users want their medical tests, like blood panels, explained to them in layman’s terms or with easy-to-parse visualizations.

Drafting the wireframes

Onboarding

After account creation to demonstrate Olive’s value as a centralizing platform, I included four optional data import and third-party platform linking prompts.

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Crafting the visual design

For Olive’s user interface, I studied and drew inspiration from Material Design’s design system.

Color

Olive’s color palette was curated to evoke trust, calm, and self-care in its users.

Typography

Validating the solution

Usability testing

Accessibility evaluation

I conducted an accessibility analysis to ensure Olive could be utilized by diverse users. I strove for conformance to Level AAA of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Below is one example of the alterations I made.

Issue

The lines and bars of Olive’s charts were difficult to tell apart, especially for those with deuteranopia.

Resolution

I changed the color of one of the bars from a secondary color tone to a neutral tone, rendering it more discernible for those who easily confuse red and green.

Impact

With Olive, I created a health tech platform that:

• Inspires trust, calm, and self-care with its color palette and UI patterns.
• Empowers users to control and understand their health and wellbeing.
• Leverages a competitor’s market advantage to target 160 million potential customers.
• Users found easier to use than 77% of digital products.

What I learned

Tools & techniques

• Researching and designing Olive was the first time I used many of the tools and techniques discussed, including software, such as Figma, Crowdsignal, and Optimal Workshop, as well as frameworks and processes such as user personas, user journeys, user flows, content audits, and site maps. Learning how to navigate new software and conceptualize novel approach while trying to deploy them effectively and efficiently is an immense challenge.
• Not only am I now proficient in these software platforms, I have developed confidence in my ability to understand and quickly learn to deploy new methodologies.

Visual design & perfectionism

• Selecting Olive’s typography and color palette and designing Olive’s UI elements activated my perfectionist impulses. I began overanalyzing the significance and impact of every UI decision, even ultimately inconsequential ones. Olive was an excellent opportunity for me to learn to put into practice the mantra “done is better than perfect”.
• Through the visual design process for Olive, I learned more effective techniques of recognizing obsessive over-analysis and how to disengage myself from these patterns.

Footnotes