Novartis cancer-support app: appointments, medication reminders, education, clinic listings, and research data collection. Built for patients, caregivers, and researchers.
The brief was to create a hybrid mobile app that offered articles, reminders, and healthcare-provider listings, while also gathering user feedback for analytics and clinical research. Achieving that meant translating high-level requirements into specs that were usable for patients and secure enough for medical data.
Patients needed appointments, medications, and trustworthy articles. Researchers needed anonymized data. The product had to serve both without making either feel like an afterthought.
Every flow (sign-up, reminders, surveys) had to handle medical information with encryption, clear consent, and privacy as a non-negotiable, not a settings toggle.
The app needed to stay calm under a full feature set and remain usable for thousands of simultaneous users, not a dense clinical tool wearing a consumer skin.
With the constraints named, the work was aimed at four objectives that later became the information architecture.
Help people manage appointments and medications without hunting through calendars or paper lists.
Offer curated, accessible articles that raise awareness and support lifestyle, filterable by therapeutic area.
Collect anonymized feedback and polls in a way that is useful for clinical studies without burdening the patient.
Design for encryption, privacy compliance, and thousands of concurrent sessions from the first screens, not a later audit.
Stakeholder interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiry surfaced two primary groups. Both demanded clear reminders, simple navigation, and data privacy they could believe.
They needed help with treatment schedules and a way to find trustworthy information without wading through the open web.
They needed anonymized data for clinical studies and analysis, without compromising the patient’s experience or legal privacy requirements.
Two personas sat on the wall for the rest of the project. They shaped what we shipped and what we refused to complicate.
Goals: stay informed about treatments and manage appointments. Pain points: forgetting medication times, and struggling to find information she could trust.
Goals: analyze patient data to identify trends for clinical trials. Pain points: needing anonymized data while staying compliant with privacy law.
Affinity mapping turned findings into a strategy the rest of the screens had to obey.
Content and reminders follow each user’s medical path, not a generic broadcast.
Clear, trustworthy information about clinical trials and healthcare providers. No buried disclaimers.
Robust data encryption and privacy language in the product, not only in a policy PDF.
Simplify sign-up, reminders, and browsing articles until the daily loop feels obvious.
Navigation was iterated from user feedback. Home offered quick access to reminders, articles, and providers. Clinical trials and settings lived in their own sections so the daily path stayed uncluttered.
A personalized home with an awareness banner, a weekly calendar strip, and today’s appointments and doses, plus polls when research needed a pulse.
Provider messaging, a drug-interaction checker handoff, and an explicit educational disclaimer: the app informs; the treating physician decides.
Critical workflows were defined before high-fidelity polish: registration, calendar-synced reminders, and content filtered by therapeutic area.
Users pick a language, then create an account with name, email, and password, or continue with social login. The first screens had to feel calm, not clinical.
Add-medicine asks frequency, start and end dates, then lands on a calendar of doses and appointments that can sync with the phone calendar.
Mid-fidelity sketches became interactive prototypes, tested on Android and iOS so usability issues showed up before engineering locked the structure.
Search and city filters lead to centre cards, then a detail view with contact, address, social, and map, built for people who need a real place, not a brochure.
The menu holds medicine history, wellness journal, polls, tutorial, settings, and privacy policy, the slower, heavier tools kept off the home path.
Three rounds of usability testing, plus a heuristic pass for error prevention, aesthetics, and efficiency. Navigation hierarchy and reminder setup were the biggest repairs.
Navigation was hard to scan. Reminder setup felt long. Both were simplified before launch.
Responsive behavior was checked on both so the hybrid shell did not hide platform-specific friction.
Final testing reached a 92% task success rate. Heuristics confirmed the remaining gaps were small.
“The app makes it so easy to track my appointments and medications. The articles are also very informative and accessible.”ICan Care user
Early interviews and three test rounds saved the information architecture. Waiting until high fidelity would have made the same findings expensive.
For medical data, encryption and anonymization are not a compliance appendix. They change what you ask, when you ask, and how you store the answer.
Patients live on home and reminders. Researchers live on polls and exports. Mixing those speeds on one screen helps neither.
Whitespace, short copy, and honest disclaimers are not decoration here. People open this app on hard days. The interface should not add weight.
This project reinforced that thoughtful design can change daily life, if you keep testing until the task, not the mockup, is the measure.