Verum Diary
My Role
Product Designer
What I did
Product design | Stakeholder management | Interaction design | User research & testing | Concept exploration
Timeline & Status
3 months, Proof-of-Concept
Overview
Verum Diary is a data collection app designed to collect stress insights during clinical trials. As a product designer, I owned the UI design work stream with a focus on concept exploration and detail design refinement. Our extended team included a principle designer, human factors engineers, software developers, and clinical specialists, fostering a multidisciplinary approach to product development.
Context
Clinical trials play a crucial role in informing pharmaceutical companies about drug action, efficacy, and safety. Measuring a patient's self-report stress levels during trials has been historically challenging, often relying on time-consuming face-to-face meetings between participants and clinicians, and countless paperwork. This manual process is burdensome and leads to infrequent data capture.
Design Opportunity
Verum Diary helps simplify the self-reporting of stress measurements during clinical trials. Collecting this self-report data remotely via an app has many benefits, including:
Participants not needing to rely on their memory regarding their stress levels over the previous weeks, providing more accurate, honest, and up-to-date data
Faster and cost effective data collection
Data is collected that may be more in-line with the speed in which mental health problems occur
Participant engagement
Maintaining participant engagement in clinical trials can be challenging, particularly with the need for frequent data input. To reduce the time participants spend on data entry, Verum streamlines the process by automatically importing data from sources like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal, requiring participants to simply confirm its accuracy.
Voice biomarkers
Voice recordings capture key phonemes, providing essential biometric data that serves as a reference for identifying chronic stress. This data is processed by the Verum machine learning algorithm, which accurately predicts patient stress levels—all while minimising effort required from the patient.
Interactions
Users are seamlessly guided to the next question upon submitting their response. They can also scroll to preview upcoming questions or revisit and edit previous responses with ease.
Visual Identity
Verum is thoughtfully designed to evoke simplicity and calmness. This approach shaped not only the choice of colours—favouring warm, soft pastel tones—but also the tone of voice, which emphasises positive reinforcement and encouragement. The aim is to ease stress and foster a sense of calm, shifting focus away from the stress inducing nature often associated with clinical trials.
