We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer about their original and creative design work. is an award-winning creative designer, that makes our world a better place with their original works.
("") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work . Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
: Our beautiful human body is a super complex system and diseases are complexly connected. Not to mention, they are complexly affected by lifestyle. It is said, “Health is all about lifestyle.” But monitoring lifestyle is a 24/7 job. Who has the motivation and time to do this? UI should facilitate gathering and connecting this huge diverse data seamlessly, continuously and unbiasedly. Also, the design should reduce the inherent anxiety common for visitors of majority of health-related websites.
: The main focus was to show layers of information and their inter-connectivity, also to create an interface that is playable. We wanted to create a more interactive experience to bring a sense of movement, excitement and comfort with a little bit of motion. The approach was to design an interface to reduce the inherent anxiety common for visitors of majority of health-related websites. We used 7 bright, modern, and engaging colors to form a clean, happy, nostalgic space. All information and functions were represented in form of icons to simplify the complexity and to break the language barrier.
: Stay tuned :)
: Design and development together took around 10 months.
: When my cofounder’s, Ari, mom was diagnosed with cancer – devastated by the news – he felt disheartened. Not just because he was powerless to help his mom but more so because he felt having spent more than a decade pursuing his passion, aerodynamics, was a total waste. You see, by then for better part of a decade, Ari was trying to find a novel solution for turbulence; one of the two most challenging and unsolved problems of classical physics. However, out of the depth of his despair, there came a new hope, a new mission, and a new passion. Ari then had a chat with me who myself had my own share of parental health scares. Almost a decade back, I almost lost my mom because of doctors ignoring her rare reactions to drugs they have prescribed. From firsthand experience, I pointed out that there are so many fragmented health data out there, that “we need to bring them into one place and members should be provided with a safe, inviting and engaging environment to share their personal data without hesitation: a living-room like space”. We felt that what made the whole ordeal more painful was a lack of clarity. Even with all the marvels of modern medicine, people were still suffering from various modern maladies (cancer, diabetes, dementia) because there was frustratingly lack of clear, coherent pathway to remedies. Worse yet, there was an absolute vacuum of any meaningful means of prevention. That was the moment we decided to apply our knowledge and expertise to tackle the wellness and healthcare informatics problems. A few years later, the two of us came together to give a birth to a wellness preventive platform through integration of data science and human-centered design. Then after a couple of months search, we found a superb data engineer and comprehensive web programmer, Kestutis, to partner up with. Together we built Wellian™. And the story continues ...
: My MArch thesis (https://issuu.com/nedabarbazi/docs/placeless-place), where I heavily used mind map for data visualization, inspired me to design a mind map interface. Here, I would like to acknowledge my friend, Ashley Eusebio (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/ashleyeusebio), for making me familiar with mind map.
: Wellian : Well + ian. Where, “well” means both “healthy” as well as “a source/reservoir of knowledge”; and “ian” suffix refers to the origin like American. So, Wellian refers to people belonging to the well place.
: Reducing time that visitors of health/wellness websites usually spend online to get to the information they are looking for and finding relationships between different data points, e.g., Lifestyle/habits, Diseases, Symptoms.
: I collaborated with entire Wellian team, in particular with Kestutis Stalmokas, our software engineer.
: Yes, scientific and ethnography research methodologies were applied for concept development, human centered design, and product strategy. We performed rigorous strategic and scientific research in the ontology expansion of the content and creating the meaningful connectivities. We also conducted research on how people are searching online for health conditions, symptoms, medications, or lifestyle habits. We utilized data from public domain and literature. We conducted personas, user interviews, and systematic surveys with wide range of demographics as well as user testing of prototypes.
: Two major challenges for us were to get visitors very quickly to the reliable knowledge in a scientifically challenging topic with so many contradictory information even in the literature; and to make them calm. People are visiting a health or wellness site mainly because they or their loved ones are not in good condition or in pain, hence are not enjoying what they are searching for. Thus, we must satisfy them by providing coherent approach, trustful info, and comfort.
