Sonde Health

Project Scope: Design Sprint, Mobile Design + Build
My Role: Experience Design Lead

Sonde Health is a digital medicine company currently developing a voiced-based technology that has the potential to transform the way we monitor and diagnose mental and physical health. In the Spring of 2016, I served as Design Lead on an engagement with Sonde to develop their first data collection app. 

While Sonde has the potential to pick up on a variety of different physical and mental maladies, the pilot experience targeted perinatal and postpartum women. This group is not only at a higher risk for depression, but undergoes regular screenings, thus making them a logical (and highly testable) subgroup. 

We began our work with usability testing to better understand the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the alpha experience. We sought to answer three main questions: 

  1. How might we increase user adoption, and retention?

  2. How might we differentiate the product from other health apps, which at the time tended to be rather sterile feeling?

  3. How might we create an experience that provides ongoing value to the user, prompting to them to return ?

Over the course of 3 days, we interviewed 10 prenatal and postnatal women. We spoke to them about their initial impressions of the alpha app experience. We gathered contextual information about their mobile habits and any stigma surrounding mental health they might have experienced. Finally, we spoke to them about what kind of things we could add to the current experience that would add value for them.

Following our user interviews, we used the feedback collected as the jumping off point for a three day Design Sprint. We worked closely with the client to gain consensus around features, business objectives and overall design direction. We then established an app flow, wireframes and a visual look and feel, which lead to a full app build of the beta project, which was available for both Apple and Android devices.

In the Spring of 2017, our team was invited to the UX2017 Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark to present our work on Sonde and to discuss the importance of empathy in Customer Experience. In 2018, we were invited to present the work to Governor Charlie Baker as an example of the transformational work happening in Boston medical tech.