OAR Health
Digital Addiction Support
Digital Addiction Support
Role: Lead product designer
Client: OAR Health
Date: 2022
Oar Health is a startup aimed to support people living with addiction. The team focussed primarily on alcohol and tobacco addictions but looked at the broader addiction space when evaluating how science-based approaches could scale.
The Task
Defining a Purpose,
Orienting Around It
Our team was responsible for building an addiction support app that can grow over time to support multiple populations through science-backed intervention methods. The experience needed to begin with a thematic purpose, to create unity throughout future growth & updates.
The Challenge
Designing for Digital
& Real World Moments
We needed to support multiple populations at different stages of addiction through medical and behavior support. Initially most member would be using the medical support side especially – as a few different prescription medicines were prescribed to help combat withdrawal system.
The experience needed to be scalable to different addiction populations who each have unique needs. But since we were building from the ground up, we needed a systematic approach to design the experience that would enable additional designers to build onto the frameworks we were creating.
The Hurdles
Keeping an essence
of Humanity
Designing digital solutions for both medical and behavioral needs is a challenging space.
- Creating a cohesive theme while anticipating how the company could grow, how user needs may evolve, and navigating HIPAA around patient care were hard to balance without over complicating.
- Going through addiction recovery is not a straight forward journey, with so many highs and low’s there is a need to ensure aspects of real human feeling and support come across even in a space that is mostly devoid of people.
- Finding ways to approach the experience systematically to prevent wasted effort or one-off solutions required a lot of time / brainstorms to work through ideas.
The Solution
Giving users different methods
to support their own addiction journey
- The app served as a record of a member’s addiction journey.
- Using different triggers, the member would take moments to understand their feelings and thoughts based on their goals, progress, medication based symptoms, and other behaviors.
Moments on your journey were organized through bite-sized reflective moments – making them more accessible and sustainable for habit building.
- As a larger system – things were approached through connections instead of having to build out separate features / experiences for each area.
Design System
Modular content driven approach
We setup foundational elements to be evolved as the experience & team grew
- Base color set + typography styles
- Theme based color tokens
- Minimalist series of components
- Content driven frameworks
And as the team grew, systematic updates were made based on that setup
Self-guided Interventions
Reflect daily with a guided check-in
Reflective Moments
Progress through science-backed interventions
Remembering Progress
Build your journey with a curated journal
