CDRC M-Health App and Clinician Dashboard

Product Design, UX & Data Visualization

I designed two sides of a complex clinical research platform: one for participants and one for the clinicians analyzing the data.

CDRC M-Health was developed with UT Southwestern as part of the Texas-Resilience Against Depression (T-RAD) program. The platform collected both active and passive smartphone data from participants ages 10–24 to support research into depression, behavior, and potential digital biomarkers. The product included a mobile app for participants and a web-based administrative platform for clinicians and medical data experts.

My Role

I led the UX and UI design for the app and web platform, translating a technically complex research project into clear, usable experiences.

My work included:

UX strategy and product design
Mobile app UX/UI
Clinician dashboard and administrative workflows
Data visualization
Information architecture
Interaction design
UI design within the UT Southwestern brand
Collaboration with developers and clinical stakeholders

The Challenge

Turn a huge amount of data into something people could actually use.

The platform needed to collect and surface two very different types of information.

Active data came directly from participant interactions, including twice-daily surveys.
Passive data was collected in the background, including activity, device usage, network connections, text usage, and phone usage.

That created two very different UX problems:

For participants: Make a research tool feel simple, approachable, and easy to use.
For clinicians: Make large amounts of behavioral data understandable and useful for research.

Designing for two audiences

The participant experience focused on simplicity. Users could access personalized content, activities, resources, their collected data, and account information without being overwhelmed by the complexity happening behind the scenes.

The clinician experience required a much deeper information architecture. The administrative portal allowed researchers to manage participants and studies, manage content, and view individual and aggregated data.

I designed the two experiences as part of the same ecosystem while giving each audience the tools and level of information they actually needed.

Data Visualization

A major part of the product was helping clinicians interpret information collected from participants.

The dashboard brought together data from multiple sources and presented it through charts, tables, and aggregated views. The UI needed enough visual distinction to make different data types understandable without turning the interface into a wall of numbers. I expanded the existing UT Southwestern color palette specifically to help differentiate and emphasize data while maintaining the established brand.

The impact

CDRC M-Health created a unified system for collecting, managing, and analyzing both active and passive participant data. The study demonstrated the potential of mHealth technology for monitoring depression and gave researchers a platform for exploring relationships between behavioral patterns and depressive symptoms.