What tools already exist and how do they address family health history?
Apps and sites living in this problem space are overloaded with features and mostly geared towards a primary caretaker responsible for multiple family members’ healthcare. The tools most specific to gathering a comprehensive health history are websites, such as My Family Health Portrait and My Family Health. Neither of these two sites are responsive; both look and feel very outdated.
Talk to your users
People often intend to keep to better track of their health records, including their family health history, but rarely get around to it. To find out why, we went straight to the users.
From patterns to people
After breaking down and analyzing behavior patterns, and four distinct archetypes emerged.
We were most interested in solving for the Conscientious Caretaker and the Procrastinator because they’ve already shown interest in recording their family history. Give them the right tool at the right time, they are more likely to take action.
Changing behavior is not easy
For insight on how to change behaviors, we looked to the Fogg Behavior Model . This framework holds there are three components that simultaneously affect behavior: motivation (the degree of willingness to do a behavior), ability (the capability to perform the behavior) and a trigger (a call to action). These three components must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. Our solution would address ability-- simplify the task of recording family history; make it easier for the user to do something they already want to do.
DESIGN
Native app or responsive website?
Because the information collected would need to be easily accessed and updated (e.g. at the doctor’s office or at family functions where there is an opportunity to gather health history), we designed for a native mobile app. This also allowed us to make use of photo uploading.
Where will the content come from?
The U.S. government provides a free API (Healthfinder.gov) for disease prevention content evidence-based Clinical Preventive Services Recommendations.
