Research through design

04 Sensemaking
in chronic diseases

Partner/Client Jhon Adrián Cerón-Guzmán

Role Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Planning, User involvement

This project explored how UI/UX design can be used to analyse and foster sustained motivation within a peer-support platform for older adults living with chronic illnesses.

Through an interactive prototype and a longitudinal user study, motivational values were translated into design interventions and evaluated, resulting in a validated set of measures that support future research into long-term engagement.

Process

Supporting the PhD research of Jhon Ceron-Guzman, this project explored how people with chronic diseases make sense of their personal health. His research, supported by existing literature, highlighted the importance of peer support. However, sustained motivation within these platforms remains difficult to define and measure. Building on these insights, we explored how UI/UX design could be used to develop and validate design measures that analyse sustained motivation within a peer-support platform.

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Based on our research findings, we identified several values that are supposed to contribute to sustained motivation. To scale the project these were narrowed down to two per motivation. Through an iterative ideation process, these values were translated into tangible UI/UX designs and interaction patterns.

To gain the necessary data to validate the measures, a five-day user study was conducted with members of the target group. Throughout the study, the interface evolved to test different motivational values through their corresponding design elements. The results showed that over the 5 days there was a significant increase in the detection of sustained motivation and several UI features and therefore motivational values suggested a positive relationship between these design choices and sustained motivation.

While the findings were promising, the study also highlighted the complexity of translating abstract values into concrete interface elements. As such, the observed effects should be understood as the result of both the underlying values and the specific design implementations used to represent them, when implemented in the future.

Concept development

Experience prototype

Study findings

The resulting prototype was a minimalistic and practical everyday evolving peer-support application designed to test these designs and interactions in a real-world context, trying to stimulate sustained motivation.