QBack
Help people with back pain easily adhere to
prescribed home exercise program and recover from back pain faster
Overview
This is a course project inspired by my visit to physiotherapy clinic at school. As a sole designer, I conducted end-to-end design process from research, ideation to prototyping. After the course, I took the project further and redesigned the solution based on the feedback I received.
Type Course Project (Individual)
Time 2 months (2018 Oct-Dec)
Tool Figma, Principle, Illustrator
Role
End-to-end Product Design
Skill
UX research, Interaction design, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Prototyping
Challenge
“70% of chronic back pain patients give up their home exercise program before seeing the result” - Kolt, G. S., & McEvoy, J. F. (2003)
How can I help chronic back pain patients to stay with prescribed home exercise programs?
Noncompliance to prescribed exercise is the major reason that makes chronic back pain hard to cure. Studies show low adherence to home-based prescribed exercise results in repetitive treatment, poor treatment outcome, and delay of full recovery from months to years. Since 31 millions of Americans suffer from chronic back pain, a solution is needed to enhance patient adherence to prescribed home exercise.
Solution
QBack- your pocket home rehabilitation exercise companion
Whether you are facing a rough patch or have concerns about your exercise at home, Qback’s goal is to support you through the difficult times of doing exercise at home and guide you throughout your rehabilitation journey.
The app pairs accounts with your physiotherapist, allowing your physiotherapist to send the custom home exercise rehab plans to you and provide clear workout guide to relieve your pain, while progress tracker motivates you to continually workout at home.
Pair with PT’s account
Pair accounts with the physiotherapist you are currently working with and access to your custom programs that your physiotherapist builds around you.
Discover custom exercises build around you
Search by custom programs, by top picks or by direct search to find the exercise for your varying pain symptoms faster.
Friendly views on weekly plans, PT instructions and schedule future workouts to make completing exercises and progressing through your rehab programs is a breeze for you.
Train with clear workout instructions
Support instant performance feedbacks- motion tracking
clear visual cues and video instruction to help you easily self-correct exercise pose and get the best results.
Exercise reporting to avoid injury while exercising
Track Your Progress
Get a comprehensive view of your program stats and progress in a dedicated tab to motivate you keep up with your regime.
Connect Your PT
Separated tab design makes it easier to feedback on exercises. Use program tab to comment or track pain report on specific exercise for modification. Or simply message to PT for any workout concerns.
Research
What’s the treatment journey of back pain patients?
To understand the current patient experience, I visited physiotherapy clinic at UM to understand the treatment process, patient support tool and visit frequency. Research result shows the major user pain points in the therapeutic journey are lack of assistive tool and continue care.
What prevent patients from performing prescribed home exercise at home?
I interviewed 5 patients at clinic, having them walk me through the entire home workout process to learn their opinions and home workout frustrations. I found 3 key user pain points.
Competitor Analysis
I researched 4 apps in the market to find the white space in existing solutions, and found the problems of current solution are: uncustomized exercise program (No PTs involving), unclear exercise instruction and no performance feedbacks.
Synthesize
Patients want a tool to recreate the physiotherapy experience as at clinic
Gathering all the research information, I found most patients were relatively satisfied with the physical therapy process in the clinic setting, however, when they were home, patients found it difficult to recreate the exercises with paper instructions and to contact their Physical Therapist. Thus, I focus on 3 design goals to extend the clinic experience to home-based rehabilitation.
Design Goals
Ideate
Brainstorming and Feature Scoping
I brainstormed the possible features around 3 major areas - motivation, customization and exercise guide.
Then I sketched each possible features to understand how they would solve user’s pain point in different scenario, and opted the features that helps the users the most.
Prototype
Sitemap and User Flow
Once the features are decided, I categorized the core functions (“Discover” and “Today”) and supporting functions (“Connect” and “Progress”) into hierarchical relations and created the user flow wireframes to make sure I don't miss important steps in the process.
Low-fidelity
Paper Prototype
I sketched out the main features of the app and ran the first usability testing to gain feedbacks on the layout, features, and interactions.
Insights from 1st usability testing
A clearer navigations and tab bars is needed to guide users starting an exercise.
Home page needs to show all prescribed programs so that users can switch to another exercise program.
Seeing weekly workout routine right away is not intuitive. Users prefer having program overview first and have control in scheduling weekly routine.
Give exercise feedback after session is hard for users. Most of them can’t recall which exercise are pain-causing.
Mid-fi Prototype
With the user feedbacks, I fixed the usability issues and created mid-fidelity prototypes to run second round usability testing.
Design Guideline
Insights from 2nd round usability testing
Program Page
Program page Info is not clear at a glance and lack of some necessary workout info.
Scheduling exercise format is too complex and time-consuming.
Exercise
Two divided screens make it harder for users to compare posture while exercising.
Need clearer visual cues and indicators to guide user correct the pose.
2nd iteration
Design Decision 1
Highlight detailed exercise info that users need to know
Design Decision 2
Simplify the scheduling from multiple selection format
Design Decision 3
Show video instructions in one screen and add more visual indicators to make self-correction easier
Insights from 3rd Usability testing
1. Users expect a pause before official exercise starts
2. Users prefer landscape mode to portrait mode while exercising on mobile devices.
3. Chat box format is hard for users to give feedback on specific exercise.
3rd iteration
Design Change 1
Add countdown video footage as a exercise buffer before starting an exercise
Design Change 2
Adapt for users’ desirable device orientation to make viewing experience more fluid
Design Change 3
Add separated tabs to channel messaging
Final Design
What have I learned from this project?
1. Make sure all features align with user problem
In the brainstorming phase, I faced a lot of ambiguity in solution spaces. Reflecting back to the essence of the problem, prioritizing the most impactful solution to design and cutting the unnecessary features helped me to find a clear map for my design solution.
2. Seek out feedback early and continually
Keeping the users in loop and testing solutions in whatever form (paper, low-fi or hi-fi) as early as possible could save ample amount of time and re-work.