Diabetes Disease Management System

Challenge:
Medtronic wanted to enhance the value of an insulin pump by coupling it with an online diabetes management program that allows patients to track their blood sugar level, food intake, and exertion levels. The application's user interface makes perfect sense to the engineers who built it, but patients find the interaction model non-intuitive and the user interface confusing. The database is modeled in a manner that makes the application processor intensive and often sluggish, further detracting from the user experience.

Solution:
Shepard conducts usability testing with diabetes patients to discover their needs from the system and to observe their interaction with the current interface. Based on this learning, we redesign the interface and test it through multiple iterations using low resolution, clickable prototypes. Redesign of database decreases the need for server-side processing, radically improving performance. Follow-up benchmark tests reveal a 60% reduction in the time required for basic data entry tasks, 72% reduction in navigational miscues.