Read time: 5 minutes

• One Drop is a tool meant to empower you in your self-care journey with diabetes and other chronic conditions
• Whether you have concerns about navigating One Drop as a first-time member or could use support with matching your health data trends to your self-care habits, we’re listening to what you need most
• To help us meet your needs, find out how you can provide your feedback about what’s necessary to achieve your health goals.

Taking care of a chronic condition like diabetes often means being told what to do: what medication to take, what types of food to eat, and what medical devices to use. But when you use One Drop, the goal is to put you back in the driver’s seat of your self-care journey. To achieve that goal, we’re keeping our ears to the ground about what your experiences look like, what they lack, and what might enrich them.

“We’re always trying to understand your experience managing your health on a day-to-day basis, how One Drop fits into that, and how One Drop can better support you,” says Lisa Rickles, director of product management at One Drop.

The One Drop research team brings to their work a sense of empathy, seeking to understand our members as whole people, not just people with diabetes. Everyone exists within an ecosystem of contextual factors. Diabetes is just one priority you may have among dozens of others, which can become barriers to self-care. It’s our job to understand those barriers and deliver a solution that actually resonates and doesn’t compete with those other priorities.

Making Daily Self-Care To-Dos As Seamless As Possible

Living with diabetes means you’re making hundreds of extra decisions every day compared to people who don’t live with the condition.

Among those decisions are likely a few related to your nutrition. When we learned about the burdensome nature of manual food logging when using apps like One Drop, as well as a common need for more flexibility in food tracking for those with multiple dietary concerns, we created several design concepts for transitional, simplified, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven food logging features. (Learn more about how AI can make life with a chronic condition more fulfilling.)

After designing several studies that allowed members to engage with conceptual prototypes, we developed improved ways to find and add multiple food items, group items, and save and name favorite frequently eaten foods or meals. We were also able to help people learn more about their daily consumption of different nutrients and their dietary goals as they relate to the intake of carbs, sodium, and fiber.

Meeting New Members Where They Are

A new diabetes diagnosis can be overwhelming for a number of reasons, and becoming a One Drop member is meant to be an empowering experience, not another source of stress.

After receiving feedback that first-time members were having trouble navigating the One Drop app and understanding the full extent of what the platform could offer them, Rickles and her team dug deeper to understand the ins and outs of how new members come into the app, what their experience is like over time, and what could be done internally to improve these experiences across the board.

“We implemented a pretty extensive process to consolidate feedback from many different sources—from the research we did on the product management team, from our customer support teams who interact directly with members, from One Drop health coaches who also directly interact with members—to get a sense of what the issues are that relate to the first-time-use experience, and we did a project to revamp that experience,” says Rickles.

Now, if you’re a first-time One Drop member, you’re greeted with “getting started” prompts that provide you with an introduction to all of One Drop’s offerings, and recommendations for a couple of key actions to kick off your self-care journey, such as tracking health data in the app and texting your coach for the first time.

“Those ‘getting started’ items also change day to day as you complete them so you get introduced incrementally to new functionalities over time,” explains Rickles.

“We also added ‘welcome’ messages for One Drop members,” adds Rickles. “When you first come into the app, you’ll see a warm welcome message reminding you that behavior change happens in small steps. As you become a seasoned One Drop member, welcome messages vary based on time of day and encourage self-care in different ways.”

Recognizing the Emotional Side of Managing Your Health

Joining a community like One Drop can be both rewarding and challenging. On one hand, you’re gaining the opportunity to streamline your self-care for your chronic condition, learn more about your health through one-on-one health coaching, and develop a better understanding of your personal health trends. On the other hand, though, it can be stressful to be so keyed into the specifics of your health, especially if you’re dealing with a new diagnosis or revamping your self-care in some way.

When it comes to blood sugar data, for example, it’s important to acknowledge the emotional aspects that can come with those numbers—the self-criticism that can follow a disappointing blood sugar reading, or the confusion of a blood sugar trend that just doesn’t seem to make sense, no matter how many times you review it. Living with a chronic condition comes with a complex mix of emotions, and we respect that in our product development process. We recognize that there can be emotion attached to the data.

Whether we’re looking for ways to make your life with a chronic condition a little easier, or we’re helping you fine tune your understanding of your personal health data, we’re listening.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on your One Drop experience. Here’s how you can get involved:

• Fill out the 90-day survey you receive via email. The opinions you provide not only help us tailor your One Drop experience, but improve the experience for everyone.
• Send an email to research@onedrop.today to be notified of upcoming research projects that might be a good fit for you.