The Challenge

“Can good design help save lives?”. This is how Nial’s post on Dribbble was titled. Over 381 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes. Nial is one of them and he was tired that there wasn’t a single app in the App Store that was well-designed and had the features he thought were relevant.

My Approach

Since Nial is a developer, he had a beta version of his vision in place. The feature set was well considered, but the design and user experience was a bit lacking.

Diabetik has been built to make managing all aspects of diabetes easier. From the ability to monitor medication habits to setting location-based reminders to make sure you never forget your insulin.

By using an innovative new technology called Smart Input, the application we’ve built looks at your medication usage and uses that information to determine which medicine you’re most likely taking at any given point in time. By learning your habits, it’s able to automagically populate fields that other applications make you type out by hand or select from menus - cutting the time needed to enter information from minutes to seconds.

It lets you monitor every aspect of your health, from tracking carbs and watching your diet, to physical activities. It can even remind you to take your medication when you enter your home.

Redesigning for iOS 7

We launched the first version of Diabetik on June 26, 2013. Three weeks after Apple announced iOS 7, featuring a controversially new design direction. Kindly put, we were a bit starstruck by the news. We made the decision to redesign the app in its entirety to make it feel more at home on the new operating system.

This whole redesign took, complete with iPad version, around 1.5 months from start to the day we launched it, again, in the App Store.

Result

The result was overwhelming to say the least. We had a great Kickstarter campaign and quite a large group of people who tested Diabetik during those months. The app launched to critical acclaim and was featured by Apple as ‘Best Apps for Diabetics’.

The American Diabetes Association shared these kind words about the design of the app: “The app has a delightful user interface and gorgeous use of subtle color shades. There are tiny and colorful icons in the app which make the overall UX great. It even has little tap sounds, which we love. Adding entries is quick and easy and there’s a lovely gesture that lets you add additional type of entries by swiping right to left on the Add screen.”

In the end, Diabetik was a huge success for me personally. It was my first big launch on the App Store and it will always have a special place in my heart because of its great community and kind words we received from people all over the world.