Meet Hypo
During my second year of IXD, we were given 3 weeks to design three screens for a smartwatch app of our choice. My final design was Hypo, a fun smartwatch app for children who are diabetic to help them and their parents manage it better.
Hypo is a smartwatch app designed to help children confidently manage their blood glucose levels throughout the day. Using realtime monitoring, child friendly alerts and clear, actionable guidance for hypoglycaemic and hyperglycaemic events, the app supports safer and simpler diabetes management.
It also helps to keep parent and carers informed, providing reassurance while encouraging children to develop greater independence in managing being diabetic.
The Problem
Children with diabetes must regularly monitor their blood glucose levels to prevent potentially dangerous hypoglycaemic and hyperglycaemic episodes, however children often struggle to independently monitor and respond to changes in their blood glucose levels.
This causes them to miss early warning signs of hypoglycaemia or hyperglycaemia especially in environments such as school, activities or other events were they are away from a parent of carer. As well as this existing monitoring methods can feel overwhelming and may not provide guidance that is easy for children to understand.
There is an opportunity to not only better inform children with diabetes by using clear alerts, simple visual feedback and age appropriate action plans but also support them with information that is easy to understand and act on.
Research
To help define my specific idea, I used mind maps to brainstorm a few different ideas as well as doing some surface level research into multiple ideas such as pollen detection to get a better understand about what each topic might entail.
After defining that I wanted to base my smartwatch designs on blood glucose monitoring for children, I started to research deeper into diabetes to get a better understanding on what it is and how digital solutions can help diabetics, especially children with the condition.
Using these insights, I conducted competitor analysis on existing applications, websites and tools used to help manage blood glucose monitoring such as the Diabetes UK monitoring card and mySugr app.
This revealed that most current monitoring tools require third party accessories such as a continuous glucose monitor (CGMs) or require users to perform a finger prick and reading. While these methods are effective, they can be inconvenient, uncomfortable for children and rely heavily on additional equipment.
This highlighted an opportunity for a smartwatch-based solution that could work alongside existing monitoring tools by providing real-time alerts when blood glucose levels become too high or too low. By sending accessible notifications directly to their watch, children could easily recognise potential issues sooner and respond quicker.
Product Development
After research, I started to create some basic ideas on how it would be laid out and how it may function. I also challenged myself artistically by drawing some characters which I could use within the UI that children can relate to.
I then started to create wireframes and develop my user interface digitally to a high-fi, using a grid to maintain a constant layout throughout all screens
I also used Procreate to start to create my characters digitally and branded it using the Hypo colours and brand mark.
Final Design
After a class critique, I made a few changes to my UI design, focusing more on the spacing and using white space efficiently to produce an overall nicer and cleaner design.
I did this by removing some elements such as speech bubbles and replacing them with just plain text.
Want To Read More?
You can visit my Notion blog to explore more about Compass and its development process.
