Painfree APP

People who have suffered from back pain might lack enough knowledge about effective prevention and treatments. Figuring out what they need to relieve the back pain and how to help manage their life with back pain is the most crucial challenge we face.
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Based on our initial observation and research, we find some basic questions that exist in people's minds when they feel back pain:

We looked for existing research and study about the preventions and treatments of non-specific low back pain from The Lancet, which helped us gain a general view about the current research results and challenges from professional practitioners' perspectives.

Low back pain afflicts all ages, especially for the working population.

Rubin(2017) mentions in his study 'Epidemiology and risk factors for spine pain' that it is estimated that 15% to 20% of adults have back pain during a single year, and 50% to 80% experience at least one episode of back pain during a lifetime. Low back pain afflicts all ages, from adolescents to the elderly, and is a major cause of disability in the adult working population." [2]

According to the study of Nadine et al.(2018): evidence about prevention, mainly primary prevention, is inadequate.[3] And they list most of the widely promoted interventions and their effect:

The preventive effect of exercise and education was significant.

Nadine et al.(2018) also summarize critical recommendations of the clinical guideline for the management of low back pain[4]:

For treatments, greater emphasis is now placed on self-management, therapies, and some forms of complementary medicine.

There have been many products for the prevention and treatments of back pain, which provide many insights into people's mental models in existing products.

It usually means a lot of work when doing an affinity diagram. OMG. The challenges we faced while we were doing the affinity diagram were these participants had different causes and symptoms of back pain, which made us feel hard to cluster. However, they do share the same feeling and faith, that is: helpless, but positive.

This map was a breakthrough and drove us to empathize with back pain sufferers. We defined every touchpoint when they feel back pain and seek help.

People need certainty on every touchpoint when asking for help from other people, materials, and products. They need to make sure they get the correct understanding of symptoms, cause, and treatment.

People need mental support to relieve their frustration. They need to accept pain and adapt to the lifestyle with back pain.

People go through numerous repetitive information and need to find the correct information efficiently.

People are willing to give back to the community when they discover new things or make progress. Even though they are not getting better, they want to share with people in similar situations.

- Define different parts of "back" - Should we use jargon? How professional do we want to get?
- Where should we put the signup page? - Before or after quiz? How do we get users to register?
- How to make sure the users are correctly following the postures? - Front camera?
- How frequently should we ask users to evaluate a treatment?
- It's challenging to define community - In what way can we engage people and help those with similar problems?

Usually, a horrible registration experience leaves a terrible first impression on people trying to use the product. We try to keep smooth running of the onboarding experience to reduce the bounce rate of this page.

Before

After

- Show the overview value of PainFree to encourage exploration.

Motivating to register is our first step. People will feel attracted when finding a possible solution for the back pain problem.

- Provide an easy and fast way to sign up

Besides email, people could use their social accounts to log in PainFree, making it easy and fast to move ahead.

Currently, two evaluation pages, the "quick evaluation" and the "whole evaluation," provide different meanings even though they have the same features. It's not intuitive and also confuses people when they do evaluations. We need to differentiate different values and purposes in these two processes and meet people's expectations.

Quick Evaluation:

Before

After

- Design for "quick".

People make a quick evaluation after each routine, so it should be easy to complete. We removed unnecessary options to make the quick evaluation as easy as possible.

Challenge 1:

Consider having people compare the pain scale before and after each routine. And continue to evaluate the impact of this feature.

Challenge 2: 

Add emotional value to this page to provide psychological relief after each routine.

Whole Evaluation:

Before

After

- Motivate people to give high-quality feedback after trying a whole treatment

Show how many people will be impacted by this comment and give people a sense of value that the feedback is helping others.

Challenge 1:

How to evaluate the psychological load of helping others? Will people be unwilling to give feedback when it comes to impacting others?

Challenge 2: 

Is there any other way to motivate people to give genuine feedback?

- Make the user flow more intuitive

Based on our user test, people will be more willing to rate first and then write comments.

Textual articles with various terms and professional knowledge are difficult to read and understand for most people. We plan to work with professional practitioners and influencers to produce videos.

Before

After

- Add videos.

Provide video-based knowledge.

- Remove articles' evaluations

Based on user tests, people don't need to evaluate the articles; instead, they prefer to evaluate an article based on the source and view numbers.