CASE STUDY: HERBAL HISTORY

THE PROBLEM

Medical marijuana is a recent development that is legal in around two thirds of US states. While people use cannabis legally, there are past stigmas and attitudes against users and the product itself. The shortage of research on the drug causes misinformation to spread and few resources available for users. The reason for a low amount of research on the drug is that the US Drug Enforcement Agency considers marijuana likely to be abused and lacking in medical value. Cannabis users use this drug for a variety of health reasons such as mood, pain, and seizures.

When it comes to the use of medical marijuana there is a lack of software available. This application will be made for users to track their usage of marijuana to record their experiences and understand their treatment. The app will also provide beneficial information to the patient and allow individual sessions to be recorded. Doctors suggest journaling to track the effects of various marijuana products in these categories. The main demographic for self-tracking are college students who use medical marijuana. There are not a lot of resources out there to track a patient’s use of cannabis. The journaling will allow users to better understand their medication and its potential benefits.

PROPOSAL

THE OPPORTUNITY

How can we create an e-journal app that allows medical cannabis users to intellectualize their own treatment journey? How do we incorporate the concept of the Quantified Self?

THE RESEARCH

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES

We performed contextual inquiries with a couple of medical cannabis users in order to understand their behaviors, habits, and practices, especially in the context of filling out an journal. The contextual inquiries consisted of background questions about their cannabis use, working together to determine what kinds of elements they would want in a cannabis e-journal, filling out an existing cannabis journal to observe their habits (made by Curaleaf), and follow-up questions about the journal.

INTERVIEWS

We interviewed a few cannabis users about their cannabis habits (e.g. frequency, types of products), reasons for using cannabis, and their likeliness to use a cannabis journal. We asked about their past experiences with health tracking apps and the kinds of factors they would like to record if they were using a cannabis journal app.

COLOR PALETTE AND FONT SELECTION

I chose an earthy color palette with warm colors for contrast to match the herbal theme. The fonts I chose had a friendly, modern feel to them and I felt that they matched together well.

HIGH-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES AND PROTOTYPE

FIGMA

PERSONAS

THE DEVELOPMENT

GITHUB

View the React Native App on GitHub here.

THE ANALYSIS

We performed a usability study on Herbal History by comparing it to one of the only similar existing apps, Releaf. We investigated whether there will be a measurable difference in time and ease to complete the tasks between the two interfaces by giving our test subjects a task to do on both (i.e. logging into an account and then filling out a journal entry in both). We also had them fill out some qualitative survey questions about their experience afterwards.

We performed a two-sample for means T-Test after studying all our subjects and we received these values:
t = 2.0325, df = 4, p-value = 0.1119

We failed to reject the null hypothesis, so we cannot definitively say that there is a significant difference between both applications. According to the qualitative survey afterwards, though, it does seem that our app is easier and more pleasurable to use compared to Releaf.

REPORT