App Feature Development

This case study covers my role as the Design lead in developing new features concepts for Lumii, an at-home digital health app that empowers people living with Myasthenia Gravis (MG) to actively manage their disease. MG is an autoimmune disorder that causes weakness and fatigue in the muscles. This 20-week project, funded by UCB, was specifically designed to address the unmet needs of MG healthcare professionals (HCP) in assessing and treating MG patients in a clinical setting.

In addition to the support of UCB, we had the amazing opportunity to partner with a leader in neurology and rare neuromuscular disease research, Professor Sabrina Sacconi, and her team at CHU Nice (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nice). As a result, we proposed four new feature concepts to be further developed and implemented (by a 3rd party production partner).

The project was broken up into four milestones: Discovery, Design, Validation, and Delivery. For each milestone, we defined the activities, outcomes, deliverables, and timeline. We also scheduled key touchpoints with Professor Sacconi, the CHU Nice team, and UCB stakeholders. It was important to ensure that we were developing these features together and we were balancing our research insights with UCB's business objectives.

The first deliverable I was responsible for was designing and facilitating a Remote Workshop with Professor Sacconi. This workshop involved the initial steps of a product discovery session followed by a prioritization exercise. As a team, we defined our objectives for the workshop:

In my experience, when designing a workshop, it's important to consider that your audience might not have the same level of comfortability working in a virtual space. I wanted this first workshop to be easy to engage in but not overly interactive. I chose to layout a Mural board with a quick introduction to digital workspaces, the workshop goals and outcomes, and clear instructions for each activity.

I was also responsible for determining how we would prioritize the list of features during our session. After doing a scan of different prioritization techniques and circling back to our objectives for the workshop, I identified four criteria that we could use to determine which features would have the greatest value and impact:

As a result of the workshop, we were able to meet our core objectives and begin synthesizing the inputs from Professor Sacconi. I created two documents that would be used by the team and client to inform which features to move into concept design. The first document was used to capture all scoring from the workshop (shared with clients and stakeholders) and the second document was used to capture all research insights for the top 10 features (shared internally).

The prioritization exercise and discussions with our Product Owner and client helped us narrow down the list of features ideas to four concepts to take into design.

While working with the support of two researchers on the team, I began conceptualizing these concepts. I love design that's driven by research because it allows me to make better design choices. But collaborating with researchers alone isn't enough, we need the input from the team and the business. I've learned over my career that collaboration is the foundation of great work, and that's why it's built into my design process.

One method I use to share my work with the team is the 30-60-90 framework. It's a really clear way to communicate where you're at and you can frame the conversation around that when requesting feedback. A change I've made over the years when reviewing work with clients and stakeholders is moving away from sharing work in progress designs in a polished deck. With clients I find that the presentation format should be reflective of what stage you're at in the design process and that's why I often share designs while they are still in Figma.

Each concept was reviewed with Professor Sacconi, her team at CHU Nice, and UCB stakeholders. With their feedback, I could go back to the designs and start iterating. Addressing feedback can be a process too. You have to consider the weight of that feedback, what value it's bringing, how much effort it will take to address and more. When needed, I'll bring the team into those conversations to share their perspective and this usually helps push the work forward.

Understanding the desirability and viability of the proposed feature concepts was crucial to the project goals. With the help of Professor Sacconi and her team at CHU Nice, we were able to uncover the unmet needs for healthcare professionals and real doctor-patient scenarios that would further inform our designs.

However, it wasn't easy figuring out the best approach to getting these insights. The research team and I facilitated six validation sessions and we learned a lot along the way. One challenge was that Professor Sacconi and the CHU Nice team primarily spoke French. It only took one session to realize that with a live translator our session length had doubled. We also noticed that we were receiving a lot more feedback on minor details rather than whether or not these concepts were actually addressing the right problems. We took these learnings and pivoted our goals & approach – not only did we lose the details (by keeping to high-level screens only), we started asking better questions.

One deliverable we were required to hand-off to our client was a representation of who would be using the app. Our researcher proposed a new artifact called Thinking Styles.

We chose this framework in order to accurately communicate that people living with MG & MG-treating HCPs are complex and multifaceted people with conflicting needs, feelings, and behaviours. We worked extremely collaboratively on developing this artifact, with my primary responsibility being to visualize the unique styles and experiences of MG & MG-treating HCPs.

The last milestone of the project was to deliver our proposed feature concepts to a 3rd party production partner, that would further develop and implement them.

One initiative I took on was capturing all the feedback we had received from our sessions with Professor Sacconi, her team, and the client in a Notions board. Because the project was fast-paced, we didn't have time to address all of the feedback. I didn't just want to provide the production partner with a way to view the feedback, I wanted them to understand what feedback was the most important based on what we had learned over the course of the project. Below is a sample of the board.

Lastly, my team and I worked on putting together a Product Requirements Document (PRD). This document covered an overview of each concept, user scenarios, the recommended requirements, unmet needs addressed, supporting research, etc. In the future, I don't know that a PRD is the best artifact to represent work-in-progress concepts. While working on this document, filling in the details felt forced and it's probably because at this stage, we didn't have all of the answers. It was evident that more research, more testing, and more insights would have helped us develop our ideas further before trying to define specific requirements for the production partner.

This project was especially rewarding to complete. One thing I didn't mention is that one month after this project kicked off I broke my ankle very badly (fifteen metal screws badly). For two months I couldn't walk and did all of my work from bed. This was challenging physically and emotionally but I was lucky to have a really supportive team who trusted me and let me maintain my role as the lead designer.