CHRONICLES: Crafting the product that will positively affect the lives of 1 million people with IBD by 2030.
“Our bodies tell stories. Stories that we are not always ready to share. However, listening to them very carefully can help us discover valuable patterns. For IBD patients, these patterns can be a lot more than simple record keeping. They can turn into their north star for wellbeing and a way to gain back the control of their lives.”
It’s more than exciting to be involved in a project with this mission and the aspiration to improve the lives of 1Μ IBD patients in the next decade. When the visionary Sanguine Lab first approached our product team, we didn’t know a lot about IBD or ever put our hands into the universe of medical apps.
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a devastating, life-changing diagnosis, affecting not only patients’ health, causing a series of debilitating symptoms, but also their social life due to its unpredictable care needs and interactions. In our interviews with IBD patients, we heard them say that they kept canceling trips, meetings with friends, work appointments, that they spent entire nights in the bathroom, that they changed many different therapies without any real improvement of their condition. We also heard them talking about this special, almost family, bonding with their doctors, a relationship that goes beyond the typical yearly check up and includes psychological support, late night calls, millions of questions and trust.
All in all, this is the story of how we went from voicing a silent health matter to designing our dearest Chronicles; a health tracking and monitoring ecosystem of digital products, seamlessly used by both IBD patients and their doctors.
Chapter #1: Partnering up with the Sanguine Lab
It’s so very rare -that’s why it definitely deserves a special mention here- for two teams that have never collaborated in the past, to blend and complement one another in such a short period of time. For Chronicles, we were lucky enough to partner up with a team of brilliant individuals driven by a powerful purpose: the Sanguine Lab team.
Working closely together since day one, the team never stopped enriching all the steps of this journey, sometimes by inspiring us with their vision, and many more times by sharing their experiences, ideas and guidance. Whether it was about field research and point of view, or crafting the actual product and pitch deck, we knew we could count on their expertise and our common commitment to co-create an impactful solution. As one team.
Chapter #2: How we worked.
In a nutshell, we brought together 12 multidisciplinary experts from both teams -experts like strategy leads, product designers, writers, visual designers, scientists and researchers, for 2 intense sprint weeks -a mix between the original Design Sprint, a Hackathon and how Agile Scrum works- fighting against one big challenge: the absence of any effective tools to track, communicate, educate and manage IBD.
We put our heads together and set our goals:
- To design a full-blown patient and doctor-centered experience, empowering personalized care, based on intelligent decision making, awareness and support.
- To drive the right behavior with the power of data and take real-time symptom tracking to a whole new level.
- To turn the not-so-appealing task of symptom journaling into a passive patient-specific way and spot the patterns that can make the difference for each patient individually.
We followed our trusted, user-centered product design methodology working in 2 teams (team branding and team product):
Both teams were meeting twice a day for a 15' morning stand up and a 15' afternoon wrap up, sharing a common backlog on Asana, and a common channel on Slack. This way, we ensured autonomy and at the same time our strong alignment.
Chapter #3: Designing an ecosystem of 3 distinct but complementary digital products.
Our first reaction was to fully immerse ourselves into a health matter we knew very little about, in order to unveil the true story: what it’s like to coexist with IBD. The Sanguine Lab team did a super extensive pre-work research, bringing us in front of medical information, patient journeys and insights, numbers, facts and stories. This pre-work alone saved the team an important amount of time and led us to an important understanding: we needed an ecosystem of digital products rather than an app, to reach the maximum impact and data accuracy.
We started with the design of the Alpha version, addressed to a limited group of users, created to facilitate the training of the hardware algorithms, turning patients’ contributions into insightful patterns, using scientific tools such as the IBD disk and weekly assessment questionnaires.
That helped us smoothly pass to the MVP version which is introducing passive monitoring with the use of hardware like wearables, combined with AI & Machine learning. Not for the sake of technology but aspiring to provide peace of mind and more accurate insights. Patients keep following their routines while their doctors can get all the updates on their health. They can now replace previously manual processes of note keeping in journals and diaries and monitor their health history at any time. All this data is live updating the relevant doctor’s dashboard, our suggested way to track patients’ condition remotely and in real-time, to manage appointments and treatment plans, combining connected care coordination and navigation.
A few points that deserve to be noticed:
- The game-changing effect of passive monitoring of symptoms and its impact on patients’ lives. Keeping track of their condition can now turn into an almost unnoticeable routine, helping them think less of their disease while numbers and qualitative data are getting more to the point, cohesive and precise.
- Keeping in mind to take care of the users’ experience in a medical app. Let’s be open here. Chronicles is all about toilet visits, pain, noting habits that the non-patients are barely thinking of in their everyday lives. This doesn’t mean that an app like this should look dry or boring. We made sure this product tells a story to its users while helping them to take down theirs. We knew we needed custom-made illustrations, user-friendly design, powerful messages, and a simple and warm tone of voice.
- The consciousness and expertise needed to collect, handle and make good use of such sensitive information. Building patients’ trust and faith on the product is also a big part of the game.
- Never underestimate the importance of going from wireframes to the perfect pitch deck to investors.
- Our gratitude for working together with a team that brought in vision, know-how, openness and empathy. Besides, at Reborrn, we love to build partnerships and thriving collaborations, leaving aside the strict client-consultant relationship.
Chapter #4: Why Chronicles is one of our favorite projects.
To have worked on a solution that benefits people’s lives by equipping them with the right tools and information, empowering them to be in charge of their own health, is a takeaway that speaks volumes to us. At the same time, we are also proud to have enabled a more effective doctor-patient relationship established on trust and data transparency.
Looking back on our Sprint with the Sanguine Lab, we realize what a powerful learning experience it was for us and our Product Proposition. Today, our vision of how the lives of people struggling with IBD can be improved for the better is falling into place. As we glimpse into the future and our upcoming projects, we are so pumped up by all the amazing new digital tools and possibilities available to us, as we are dedicated to uncovering ways in which we can introduce many more solutions that harness technology’s potential for the common good.
IBDs are a cycle of bad and better days. Chronicles is designed to help with both, aiming to manage flare-ups and maintain remissions, to reduce complications and strive for less hospital visits. Hoping for days that patients will happily state: “I didn’t think of it at all on that day”.
Would you like to see more of Chronicles? Check out our Behance case study here 🙂
Special thanks to Louiza Kallia for adding a lot of words in this article and to Eirini Chouvarda for adding the visuals next to them. And of course, a big thank you to The Sanguine Lab team for their trust and collaboration.
