Dexcom Accessibility

7 week design sprint to increase accessibility of the Dexcom apps.

Disclaimer: This project is under NDA

This project is protected under an NDA contract, therefore many details are purposely left out. However, I am more than happy to talk about our process and the key insights I’ve learned, so feel free to reach out!

My Role

UX Research

UI/UX Design

Duration

Oct 2022 - Dec 2022

(7 weeks)

Tools

Figma

Miro

Team

5 Designers

Context

Diabetes Design Initiative is a program by UC San Diego Design Lab in collaboration with Dexcom. For 7 weeks, our team worked with Dexcom stakeholders and mentors to improve the accessibility of existing Dexcom apps.

What is Dexcom?

Dexcom is a company that produces continuous glucose monitoring systems for diabetes management. Diabetes is a disease where a person has trouble regulating their blood sugar or blood glucose level.

What is a continuous glucose monitor?

Continuous glucose monitor is a device that is attached to a patient’s body to automatically record glucose levels throughout the day. The information is sent to Dexcom apps where people can directly view using their smartphone.

Problem

How can we increase the accessibility of the information provided on the Dexcom apps to users with different accommodation needs?

* This is a very high level overview of the problem, I am unable to disclose the exact problem.

Project Timeline

Double Diamond Process

Discover

The first step we took was to perform primary and secondary research. We also looked at other diabetes technology companies such as Medtronic and Libre.

To further understand the needs of users, we conducted user interviews with users with disabilities to understand how they currently access the information they need, what information or features are not accessible to them, what information is most important to them. We also interviewed able bodied users to understand their perspective.

Interviews conducted

8

8

Perspectives gained

Define

We used affinity maps to analyze our results.

We created journey maps of day in the life of a diabetic patient to gain a deeper understanding of different use cases.

We found that

It also came to our attention that there are not enough accessibility features, leaving much information inaccessible to different users.
Many people don’t know about Dexcom’s current accessibility features, and therefore don’t use them.

We narrowed our scope down to two main areas, one to implement more accessibility features, second to increase the discoverability of the accessibility features.

Develop

We started ideating different solutions by doing Crazy 8 sessions. Our initial prototype included 6 different ways to access information that is currently inaccessible to many disabled users, and 2 ways to educate the users on the features.

Deliver

We scheduled two rounds of user testing. After the first round, we realized that due to our time constraint, it was too much to focus on all the features in our initial prototype. We decided to only focus on 2 features. We iterated and tested for a second round.

4/4

disabled users said they would use these features if it gets implemented.

We delivered our final prototype and our design process to Dexcom Stakeholders at the end of the sprint and received positive feedback!

Conclusion

Next Steps

We did not have a lot of time to iterate again after the second round of user testing. Next step is to further improve our prototype based on feedback from the second round user testing.

My Role

We worked very well as a team and made every decision together. Here are some things I took responsibilities for

Conducting more than half of user interviews and user testing
Prototyping our final design

Lessons Learned

1. How to conduct usability testing, set up testing protocols, and ask the right questions.

During my second user interview, the participant talked a lot off topic. It was hard for me to stop her. We ended up not finishing the interview in time. After that, I learned that I need to ask very straightforward and concise questions, and shouldn’t be afraid to interrupt when appropriate.

2. The difference between user journey and user persona.

For this project, it was particularly useful to use a user journey instead of a user persona. Before this, I wasn’t sure what the difference is between a user journey and an user persona.

3. Come to every meeting prepared.

I learned that it was essential to come to every meeting prepared with an agenda and things to say, even if it is a quick internal team meeting. It is easy to forget things unless it is written down.

Thank you!

This project could not have been done without the help of our Dexcom mentor, our Design Lab advisor, and our project manager. I am very thankful for all the resources I have received throughout the process. My team were all very responsive in terms of communication and each contributed greatly to this project. Through this project, I gained invaluable industry experience and gained more confidence in my design skills.

Reach out :)

Many details could not be disclosed due to my NDA contract, so please reach out with any questions! I promise I don't bite :))