Development of an application interface for lifelong use on the example of a mobile diabetes diary

Diabetes is one of the most common diseases worldwide. In Russia alone, the number of diabetics is 9.5 million people, in the world this number reaches 422 million, and this is every 18th person.

I, the developer of the application for diabetics, I am this same 18th person, at 8 years old I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.



For those who are not very familiar with this topic, I will explain that diabetes is an autoimmune incurable disease in which the human body itself can not cope with the regulation of glucose (sugar) in the blood.

Because of this, diabetics of the first type have to constantly inject insulin - on average 5 times a day, and measure blood sugar by piercing a finger on average 7 times a day. Diabetics of the second type most often cost just following a diet and taking pills, but still they sometimes have to connect insulin therapy.

How can a mobile application help all these people?

Problem

The most important thing for diabetes is to control your sugar level , because if you don’t do this, various complications can occur, such as blindness, kidney, heart and leg diseases (I think it’s best not to attach such pictures to the article, but you can google it to understand the seriousness “Diabetic foot”).



To achieve good sugars, diabetics must constantly monitor what they eat, how much insulin they put, and how it affects sugar. This is done with the help of a thing called the “diabetes diary” or “self-monitoring diary,” and it looks like this:





Keep such a diary, making 10 entries every day, it can be very difficult, especially when you consider the perspective that promises to do this for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, observations show that many diabetics stop doing this soon after leaving the hospital due to the inconvenience of this process.
And the lack of data subsequently affects sugars, because when you come to the doctor there will simply be nothing for the patient to show, and the doctor will not be able to adjust the dosage of insulin and give any recommendations other than keeping a diary.

I will not dissemble, I myself also became a victim of this problem, and although I had more or less normal sugar, I decided to do something about it.

Existing solutions

The first thing I did was look for applications that could solve my problem, and, to my surprise, there were practically none of them in the Russian AppStore (on request, out of 10 diabetes, only 4 applications were related to maintaining a diabetes diary).

Unfortunately, on each of the applications I could not hold out for a week, since the process of entering data into them turned out to be a long one (but this, of course, is only my subjective opinion). And for some applications, the interface, in general, conveyed greetings to applications that wrote even on PDAs to zero.



In the American AppStore, the situation was much better, and the giant niche there is such a giant as mySugrDiabetes (which is not surprising, the guys are great and work very well in terms of user retention).



But there is no localization for all these applications, and you just can’t download them in our AppStore, for this you need to create a separate account.
I did not even consider options for keeping a diary in a tablet in Excel or in a browser.
As a result, as a developer of mobile applications, I decided to start working on my own product.

Developed solution

The main thing to achieve when developing the application was the convenience and speed of keeping a diabetes diary. Accordingly, the priority goal was to reduce the time of entering data into the application and access to them.

Diary screen

The main screen that the user sees when opening the application is the Diary screen, in which the user can see his last 10 entries to recall previous indicators, and gets access to data input.

In diabetes, the three most important factors are:

1. Glucose level, which is measured in mmol / l;
2. Meal, which is measured in bread units (1 XE = 12 grams of carbohydrates);
3. Insulin injection, which is measured simply in units, and is divided into short and extended types of insulin.

In this case, all data can be entered both together or separately.


There are other factors that diabetics need to consider, but they are not so important, so for now the focus has been only on these three indicators (I’ll probably tell you in another article about the introduction of other indicators).
In order not to complicate the user with additional steps, if he needs to enter only one parameter, the ability to go directly to a specific indicator was added.

Input screen

For the input screen, the task was to find a solution that is different from the standard way of entering data through the keyboard, since entering an integer value with a fractional part and a comma requires a large number of clicks and takes a lot of time. Several solutions were considered, such as selecting a value using the circular interface element and a carousel to quickly scroll to the desired value. Unfortunately, they also did not solve the problem, since the value of sugar and insulin can fluctuate from 0 to 20 units (sometimes more) and for large values ​​the elements were twisted for a rather long time.

As a result, the optimal solution was to use a conventional slider, but with its division into two parts: integer and fractional. Thus, the user can easily select the value he needs with one or two clicks, and, if he makes a mistake, correct it without removing his finger.

We also did not refuse keyboard input, and to whom this method seems inconvenient, it can use the standard input method. The keyboard and slider work together and the value entered from the keyboard can be immediately corrected by the slider.



When completing the input of a specific value, the user is not limited to the sequence of data entry steps and, using the navigation carousel, can swipe to move to the desired stage.

Additionally, if the user specified in the settings his own coefficients for calculating the dose of insulin (insulin sensitivity factor and carbohydrate coefficient), the applicationwill calculate the dose for him , and you can enter it by clicking on the specified value.

Goals Screen

An important function is also the ability to set reminders for procedures related to diabetes, for this purpose a screen of goals has been developed. I will not describe all the functionality, just talk about the implemented functions that will help save the user time.

The first function is to automatically create a goal, when the user can configure the program so that it will create a reminder about measuring sugar after x period of time if there was a meal or insulin injection in the recording. This saves time adding the most frequent and necessary reminder - measure sugar after eating or insulin.

The second function is automatic target closing. Since goals are divided into three main categories (Sugar, Food and Insulin), not counting “Miscellaneous”, the application can automatically check for the parameter that the target requires to enter and if it is in this record and is in the right time interval, in the added record from our goal - the goal will automatically close and the user will not need to mark it himself.

Statistics screen

In addition to the need to maintain data, the user needs to be given the opportunity to easily analyze them . Again, I will not dwell completely on all the elements, but I will describe the most important points.

The most important indicators for the user, which include average sugar, the dispersion of sugars and their ratio , are immediately calculated and they are given the quality of sugar level monitoring. The characteristic for the assessment is taken from the goals set by the user in the settings, and is divided into "Excellent", "Good", "Normal" and "Bad" so that the user can immediately analyze the value displayed to him.

In this case, statistics can read data in this way not only by days, but also by weeks and months (then the dynamics of average sugars by days is then reflected on the chart).

Conclusion

The application has been in the AppStore for 3 months already, and on Google Play for 2 months, all users have responded positively to the user-friendly interface, even forgiving the application a lag in its functionality compared to peers (which we are gradually solving).

And after the release, the application even successfully got to the main page in the AppStore in the top new applications of the week.



Now, of course, there are difficulties with the promotion of the application, since this is done by me more on an initiative basis, and there are no serious advertising budgets, but it’s good that every day, organic users enter the application, who simply look for diabetes-related applications in the AppStore, as I once did.

Thanks for attention!

I would like to hear your opinion about the implemented screens and tips on how to improve the developed interface. In the future, perhaps I will write another article about the intricacies of the implementation of already new functionality in the application (and there are many plans ahead).

PS: Of course, I myself have been keeping a diary since the release of the application and, to my surprise, do not abandon it.