Vantage Care · Process
Research, personas, flows and the design system behind Vantage Care. The case study covers the decisions; this is the work underneath them.
02 — User Research
The brief supplied Margaret. Rather than broadening her into a segment, I kept her specific and added the two people who orbit her — the adult child who set the phone up, and the care coach on the other end of the readings. Designing for a named person made every trade-off concrete.
03 — Defining the Opportunity
Senior-first design usually collapses into an aesthetic of huge grey buttons on white — visibly "the simple version." Margaret does not want the simple version. The app had to be genuinely premium and genuinely legible at the same time.
The reading cannot happen without a paired Bluetooth cuff. Hiding that until it fails produces a technical error at the worst possible moment. The dependency had to be visible, explained and recoverable throughout the flow.
A silent notification in a tray is invisible to the user who most needs the prompt. But an alarm that fires wrongly is alarming in the literal sense. The reminder had to be impossible to miss and impossible to misread.
A high reading at home, alone, is frightening. The app needed a named person one tap away from every screen — present enough to reassure, quiet enough not to imply that something is constantly wrong.
04 — Discovery & Research
Roughly half of patients prescribed home blood-pressure monitoring stop within months. Abandonment is rarely about the clinical value — it is about friction, uncertainty about correct technique, and the absence of feedback confirming the effort is worth anything. (Source: AHA Home BP Monitoring Scientific Statement)
WCAG AA sets 4.5:1 for body text; AAA sets 7:1. For users with age-related vision loss the difference is the gap between readable and legible. Setting 7:1 as the floor rather than the aspiration meant the palette had to be designed around contrast, not corrected for it afterwards. (Source: WCAG 2.2 Contrast Guidance)
Talking, crossed legs, a full bladder, or an unsupported arm can shift a reading by clinically meaningful margins. A monitoring app that only records numbers without coaching posture is collecting data that may actively mislead the clinician reading it. (Source: ESH Home BP Measurement Guidelines)
05 — User Flow
06 — Toolkits
Designed and built end-to-end — from the assignment brief through an interactive HTML prototype to a running native Android application with real scheduled alarms.
07 — Design Strategy
The governing rule throughout was that Margaret is not a constraint on the design — she is the design target. Every decision was tested against her first, and repeatedly the version that worked for her was simply the better version. Larger type forced tighter copy. Bigger targets forced fewer actions per screen. The accessibility work made the product better, not merely compliant.
10 — Design System & Scalability
The hardest requirement was not any single token — it was that every one of the eight accessibility controls could be combined with any other and nothing could break. Triple text size with bigger buttons and roomier spacing is a brutal layout test, and passing it is what forced the one-job-per-screen rule to hold everywhere.
Body text at 7:1 contrast minimum — AAA, not AA. Colour is never the only signal: every status is colour plus icon plus word. One clear job per screen, stated at the top.
Errors are blameless and always recoverable, and a named human — Dana — is reachable in one tap from anywhere in the app.
Every layout is verified at the largest text level with bigger buttons and roomier spacing enabled simultaneously — the worst-case combination — with no clipping, no overlap and no horizontal scroll.
High contrast drops translucency entirely rather than tinting it, so frosted-glass surfaces degrade to solid rather than to muddy.
The Eight Controls
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Larger text | Scales all type across three levels, shown as a three-dot level indicator rather than an abstract slider |
| High contrast | Switches to an AAA-leaning solid palette, dropping translucency entirely |
| Clear font | Swaps the entire interface to Atkinson Hyperlegible, designed for low vision |
| More spacing | Roomier line height and padding for users who track lines with difficulty |
| Bigger buttons | Raises every touch target to 72dp or above for less-steady hands |
| Reduce motion | Freezes all animation, including the gauge draw and count-up numbers |
| Vibrate on tap | Real haptic confirmation that a tap registered — critical for tremor |
| Read pages aloud | Text-to-speech narrates each screen automatically as the user navigates |