SugarCare
Year
2021
Type
Trazos School Side Project
Discipline
UX
Sofware
Figma, Claude Design
Problem Statement
SugarCare.
A diabetes companion
designed for the wrist.
An end-to-end UX project that rebuilt how people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes — and the families who love them — log readings, share alerts, and stay calm. iOS & watchOS, twelve weeks, one panic button. Made in Madrid Spain, during my tendure at Trazos School
The problem isn't the device.
It's the parent
watching the numbers.
Sugar Diary is a SaaS app dedicated to controlling childhood diabetes by parents and guardians — through alerts, notices and advice synched with continuous glucose monitor devices. The product is for the adults watching the screen, not the kids wearing the sensor.
"I like technology and my biggest concern is my son's diabetes." — Primary persona, Bremen · cashier, 49, single mother
Three flagship surfaces.
Each rebuilt three times.
Dashboard
Sync your
device.
Scan the QR code on the glucometer to pair the CGM with your child's profile.
Need help, now?
Press & hold to send your live location and last reading. Release to cancel.
Pairing · Emergency
Apple Watch
A four-step loop.
Not a waterfall.
To envision, shape ideas and craft solutions, I follow a four-step process. Each cycle returns to research before it touches Figma again.
Listen before
drawing.
Two surveys across Germany and Spain, 125 combined responses, a UX Lean Canvas. Build the problem before the solution.
Shape the
real problem.
A primary persona, a parent's user journey, and the insights that survive every meeting. One sentence per insight, no exceptions.
Sketch loud.
Refine quiet.
Low-fi → mid-fi → hi-fi, each round trying to delete a screen. The system grows from atoms — chips, tokens, types.
Hand it over.
Watch it break.
Think-aloud testing with three users on five tasks. Score on time, errors, ease. Fix the loudest fail. Loop.
One parent.
One kid.
One product between them.
Erica, 49
Analytical and protective. Her 8-year-old was diagnosed two years ago. She wakes twice a night to check his levels and copes by reading every article she can find. Calm, technology-literate, but at the limit of her bandwidth.
- Goals
- Improve healthy habits · solve emergencies fast · tranquility & peace.
- Frustrations
- Apps that hide the alert. Articles full of jargon. Single-locale food databases.
- Devices
- iPhone · Dexcom G7 · Child's insulin pump
Marta, 8
Doesn't want to feel different at school. Carries a phone with the app installed but isn't the primary user — Anke is. We designed the kid's side to be minimal, friendly and never alarming.
- Goals
- Be a normal kid. Eat lunch. Tell mum she's fine without a screenshot.
- Frustrations
- Too-technical apps, conflicting advice online, fear of false negatives.
- Devices
- iPhone 12 · iPad shared with son · no wearable
Parents fear, kids forget.
Parents of diabetic children fear for their health, since kids aren't aware of the care they should put into their diet. The product has to bridge that gap calmly.
Tranquility is the feature.
What parents want isn't more data — it's peace of mind. Alerts before things go wrong, not after. Geolocation, not surveillance.
Emergency is one screen.
Hypo or hyperglycemia events have to surface as a full-screen alert with four actions — Call, Sound/Vibration, Geolocate, Send Message — never buried in a tab.
Numbers need narrative.
"125 mg/dL" is data. "Steady since lunch" is reassurance. Every reading is paired with a trend chip and a plain-language status.
Education is medicine.
Improvement in healthy habits is one of the four user goals. A trusted, in-app library beats a 2 a.m. forum search every time.
Four tabs.
One emergency.
Every surface collapses into four primary destinations: Dashboard, Therapy, Info, Profile. The emergency screen lives outside the tab bar so it's never one menu away.
Warm, calm,
medical-adjacent.
One red,
one ink.
- Accent · #FF5436
- Pressed · #B21D10
- Berry · #6B1922
- Ink · #16140F
- Cream · #F1EAD8
- Paper · #FBFAF6
Inter,
two weights.
- Display · 200 / -0.04em
- Italic emphasis · 300
- UI · 400 / 500
- Numerals · tabular
- Eyebrows · 0.22em tracking
- All-caps for labels only
Twelve
atoms.
- Glucose chip
- Trend card
- SOS button (3 sizes)
- Tab bar (raised)
- Onboarding step
- Article card
Three users.
Three tasks.
One think-aloud.
Following Nielsen's think-aloud method, participants used the prototype while continuously verbalising what they were doing and why. We were after qualitative friction, not statistical truth.
Anke, 49
Mother of a Type 1 child. iPhone-only. No wearable experience.
Lucía, 20
Type 1 since age 8. Heavy CGM user. Tech-comfortable.
Pilar, 51
Type 2, recently diagnosed. New to tracking apps.
CTAs were hard to recognise.
Two of three users tapped the glucose number expecting it to open detail. Our primary CTA was visually quiet next to the data card.
Fix: raised the "Log reading" button into a floating ink pill above the tab bar.
Swipe-to-switch was invisible.
Nobody discovered that swiping the glucose card switched between Day, Week and Month.
Fix: added a segmented control above the card and a subtle swipe affordance.
Scroll wasn't obvious.
Pilar didn't scroll the heart-disease article. The hero image filled the screen and read as a fixed splash.
Fix: compressed the hero, peeked the headline above the fold, added a chevron-down.
"I love that it doesn't look like a hospital app. But I would never have found this swipe." — Anke, P01, on the dashboard
Quiet CTA, hidden swipe
Loud CTA, visible segments
What changed.
What I'd do differently.
- → More research and testing
- → Test the family circle, paired
- → Voice + accessibility (VoiceOver, HC mode)
- → User target from guardians, to adults that want to track their glucose.
The most useful skill in this project wasn't Figma, or research, it was knowing what not to put on the screen. Understanding the process and basics of UX Design.