| THE AWARD |
| CATEGORIES |
| REGISTRATION |
| SUBMIT YOUR WORK |
| ENTRY INSTRUCTIONS |
| TERMS & CONDITIONS |
| PUBLICATIONS |
| DATES & FEES |
| METHODOLOGY |
| CONTACT |
| WINNERS |
| PRESS ROOM |
| GET INVOLVED |
| DESIGN PRIZE |
| DESIGN STORE |
| THE AWARD | JURY | CATEGORIES | REGISTRATION | PRESS | WINNERS | PUBLICATIONS | ENTRY INSTRUCTIONS |
Wellian Website by Neda Barbazi |
Home > Winners > Design #57821 >Interview |
 |
|
FS: What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
NB: 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.
FS: What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
NB: 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.
FS: What are your future plans for this award winning design?
NB: Stay tuned :)
FS: How long did it take you to design this particular concept?
NB: Design and development together took around 10 months.
FS: Why did you design this particular concept? Was this design commissioned or did you decide to pursuit an inspiration?
NB: 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 ...
FS: Where there any other designs and/or designers that helped the influence the design of your work?
NB: 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.
FS: How did you come up with the name for this design? What does it mean?
NB: 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.
FS: What is the most unique aspect of your design?
NB: 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.
FS: Who did you collaborate with for this design? Did you work with people with technical / specialized skills?
NB: I collaborated with entire Wellian team, in particular with Kestutis Stalmokas, our software engineer.
FS: Is your design influenced by data or analytical research in any way? What kind of research did you conduct for making this design?
NB: 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.
FS: What are some of the challenges you faced during the design/realization of your concept?
NB: 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.
FS: Thank you for providing us with this opportunity to interview you.
A' Design Award and Competitions grants rights to press members and bloggers to use parts of this interview. This interview is provided as it is; DesignPRWire and A' Design Award and Competitions cannot be held responsible for the answers given by participating designers.
| SOCIAL |
| + Add to Likes / Favorites | Send to My Email | Comment | View Press-Release | Translations |
