Alec DeNapoli
Five phones showing the Treatment Tracker app — Movement Videos, My Journey, the Home dose log, Treatment, and Resources — fanned out in a row.

03 Treatment Tracker

Helping patients find success during complex treatment journeys

A mobile app that helps movement-disorder patients stay on a complex treatment by making their progress visible.

Role
Product Designer
Team
Alec DeNapoli, Jenna-Leigh Meola, Chris McGillicuddy, Chandlyr Jackson
Timeline
2023
Tools
Figma

A note on confidentiality: to protect the product's IP, the details, copy, assets, and branding shown here have been reworked for this portfolio.

The problem

Progress is hard to recognize.

The titration is genuinely complex: patients mix three tablet strengths to hit each incremental dose on the way to their effective one. Without a clear sense that they're moving forward, many drop off before they get there.

Patients feel unheard.

It's hard to convey the social, emotional, and physical toll of uncontrolled movements, and patients often leave appointments feeling their experience didn't land with their provider.

New treatment is risky to adopt.

Patients already juggle many medications daily and are wary of anything that might disrupt a hard-won stability.

The 'Emotional Adopter' persona — Michelle, 45, living with bipolar disorder and a moderately severe movement disorder. She seeks validation and reassurance, wants stability and to be taken seriously, trusts her doctor's instructions, and manages an average of 7+ medications.

How might we empower patients to take an active role in their treatment, help them find their effective dose, and reduce the stress along the way?

The approach

We started from a large base of existing marketing and ethnographic research on the patient experience, then expanded the jobs to be done — covering the patients themselves, the caregivers who help with treatment, and the healthcare professionals treating them.

Jobs-to-be-done mapped across three stages of the treatment journey: newly diagnosed and first prescription, 'finding my dose' in weeks one to four, and HCP follow-up visits.

From there we wrote "how might we" statements and ideated against them, moving from messy sticky-note sketches to low-fidelity digital mockups. We deliberately generated multiple solutions per HMW and flagged the blockers, open questions, and concerns worth raising with stakeholders. For two weeks the room became a sticky-note war room in the run-up to user interviews.

A zoomed-out Figma board covering hundreds of low-fidelity screen concepts and annotated flows, with starred sections marking the concepts taken forward into interviews.

What we learned

We used those concepts as stimuli in user interviews to test feasibility. The goal was to gauge the usefulness and usability of the app and HCP dashboard, and to gather the contextual detail that would shape the design.

14
Sixty-minute interviews with patients living with the movement disorder
20
Seventy-five-minute interviews with the healthcare professionals who treat them

What resonated

Daily reminders

Showing which tablets to take, and when — especially valuable early, before treatment becomes routine.

"Reminders would be good. If you're just starting out and it's not part of your routine." — Patient 1

Quality-of-life check-ins

Tracking how the condition affects daily life gave patients a reason to keep engaging, and gave clinicians a fuller picture.

"It's helpful to get a deeper understanding of how the condition is affecting them and what's working." — HCP 5, neurologist

Movement progress videos

A novel, objective, longitudinal record of adherence and symptom change — and a shared talking point for appointments.

"I want my doctor to be on the same page. The videos could be a talking point for our next appointment." — Patient 12

What we designed around

Time

A long setup or heavy activities risked disengagement. We streamlined onboarding and auto-populated as much setup as possible to cut steps.

Data liability

Unreviewed patient-shared data carried legal risk. We kept all data stored on-device, shown to the HCP in person rather than reviewed asynchronously.

Physical limitations

Involuntary movements make precise tapping hard. We used larger-than-standard touch targets to keep the experience accessible for lower dexterity.

What we shipped

We designed an elegant experience for a complex treatment process in a highly regulated pharmaceutical space. Getting the information architecture right took real work. As complexity grew, features spread out and settled in their own dedicated spaces.

The app's site map: sign-in and consent onboarding leading into five top-level sections — Home dose logging, My Treatment, My Journey, Resources, and Settings — with in-app notifications and push notifications branching off.
A diagonal collage of dozens of finished Treatment Tracker screens, spanning dose logging, schedules, check-ins, movement videos, resources, and settings.

Home

Log doses, view medication details, track adherence, jump into other sections, and manage notifications for progress tracking.

The Home screen on two phones: a dose log for Today, May 2 showing Dosing Schedule 1 at 10mg daily with an 'I took my dose' button, and the same card in its taken state with an undo link.
In-app notifications on Home: a check-in reminder card at the top of the screen, and the full Notifications list with movement video and check-in reminders.
Reminders for weekly progress-tracking activities, plus helpful tips.
The empty first-use state of Home, reading 'Let's start your journey' with 'Add your treatment plan' and 'Need help?' buttons, and the help sheet opened over it.
On first entry, users can explore freely but are guided to add their treatment information to start using the app.

The design challenge here was constant information triage. Adherence progress, today's tablets, the active schedule, FAQs, progress activities, and paths to review or edit it all competed for the same screen. As the app architecture shifted, so did Home — most components went through dozens of iterations to land the right priority.

Treatment

Create and edit titration schedules, and see what's current and upcoming so patients know what to expect.

The Treatment screen on two phones: the medication header with tablet strengths above Dosing Schedule 1 at 10mg daily, and further down the 'Add Dosing Schedule', 'I need to restart titration', and 'My medication changed' actions.
Four steps of adding a dosing schedule: choosing the daily dose, choosing the tablet combination, picking a start date on a calendar, and confirming the summary before saving.
Enter the weekly dose, tablet combination, and start date for each dose change.

We consolidated what used to be several separate edits (medication type, reminders, schedules) into a single edit path per schedule, and moved dense regulatory documents into the header and settings tab so the core task could breathe. Screens started very dense and gained room as we went — enough to communicate every detail without overwhelming the patient.

Journey

Complete progress-tracking activities like weekly check-ins and movement videos, and review treatment progress and history.

The My Journey screen on two phones: a line graph charting dose changes up to 30mg daily above the latest check-in responses, and the Past Progress list linking to weekly check-ins, movement videos, and past dosing.
Three history screens: the check-ins summary with severity ratings across schedules, the movement video library, and past dosing with a dose log per schedule.
Historical views of completed check-ins, recorded movement videos, and logged doses.
The three check-in questions: rating uncontrollable movements, rating embarrassment or difficulty socializing, and selecting which daily activities were made harder.
Rate the intensity of involuntary movements, where they're occurring, and the impact they have on daily life.
The movement video flow: a 'What to expect' screen listing the five prompted actions, the guided recording view with a face outline and countdown, and playback of a saved video tagged with the week and daily dose.
Record an AIMS-style video (Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale) to keep an objective record of symptoms to show a provider.

I contributed the flows, interview stimuli, mid-to-high-fidelity mockups, and the dose-change visualization. Journey was always meant to be a place for motivational reflection — showing patients how far they'd come and keeping them accountable to their own tracking. Business and regulatory constraints led us to an elegant line graph charting each patient's dose change over time.

Resources

Learn how the treatment works, how to use the app, when to expect progress, and how to connect with outside organizations.

Five Resources screens: about the treatment, how the treatment works, getting the most out of the app, the help center with a support number, and links to outside mental health organizations.

Reflection

This was a fast, end-to-end push to MVP — taking a regulated piece of software from research and concepting through testing and validation, all the way to production. The recurring design problem was the same one the patients face: a lot of dense, clinical information that has to become something a person under real physical and cognitive load can actually use. Getting that balance right, section by section, is what made the difference between an app patients would abandon and one that helps them stay in it long enough to find their dose.