iHealth Messaging Stickers
This is a set of illustrated stickers I made for iHealth, a digital health company, to support healthcare team members’ communication with patients through a mobile app. I created several iterations experimenting with different styles and incorporated feedback from users to find a style that would resonate with patients while maintaining a professional appearance. The stickers aim to both help patients meet clinical goals and provide patients with emotional support.
Project Definition
Target users: Care team members communicating with elderly chronic disease patients through a messaging system on a care portal.
Need: Care team members need a way to support adherence to treatment protocols by engaging directly with patients, as well as a convenient way to provide patients with emotional support and encouragement.
Solution: A series of custom message stickers that provides patients with emotional support and reminders of daily health maintenance/chronic disease management activities.
Benefits of this solution:
-
Visually amplify messages reminding patients of behavioral goals
- Provide encouragement to patients to uplift them and act as positive reinforcement for healthy habits
- Serve as a convenient way for care team to interact with patients when they are unsure how to respond
- Bring a sense of delight to the patient experience and make it more memorable
Based on the target audience, need, and proposed solution, I defined a set of principles to guide my designs. Because many of the patients are elderly do not speak English as their native language, I researched best practices for designing for seniors and took those into consideration. I also researched the sticker features on popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage to see what types of stickers are popular among elders.
Design principles:
- Positive, warm, encouraging tone
- Communicate information primarily through images rather than text (patients should understand even if the text isn’t in their native language)
- Sense of human touch, but professional appearance
- Readability: easy to interpret, easy to read, high contrast, large font size, not too much text
- Inclusive and universal
First Drafts
User Feedback
After creating an initial set of designs, I asked care team members for feedback on the style and content of the stickers. Care team members expressed that they hoped to prioritize providing emotional support to patients rather than sending task-based reminders, so I shifted my direction to focus more on supportive messages using a friendlier visual style.
Second Iteration
Further Style Shifts
Further conversations with users and team members illuminated that it would be important for the stickers to maintain a professional appearance, given that they would be used by a digital health company. Based on this feedback, I adapted the second set of designs to a more minimal style, with cleaner typography, flat colors, and geometric shapes.