When the team divided up the app's screens, taking the PRWE form wasn't assigned; I chose it. The completion data was clear: patients weren't finishing the form, and incomplete answers meant clinicians couldn't accurately track recovery. No amount of gamification on top of the app would matter if the core data-collection experience was broken enough that people gave up mid-way.
The PRWE (Patient-Rated Wrist Evaluation) is a validated 15-item clinical questionnaire measuring wrist pain and function, the primary tool clinicians at Linköping used to track patient progress across two domains: pain intensity and activity difficulty. Before redesigning anything I needed to understand what each question was clinically measuring, because any change that altered what was actually being asked or introduced response bias would produce worse outcomes than the original broken form. That constraint defined the scope: the interface, the pacing, and the feedback were all fair game. What the form measured was not.
WristCheck wireframe
Before touching Figma, I read about form psychology: the cognitive and emotional reasons people stop filling things out halfway through, and how length perception, visible progress, and interaction rhythm affect completion. Part of the framing also came from my own experience with medical forms: they feel like a chore, and I've left them half-finished. I wanted to make this one feel like something you could get through without it feeling like that.
The same root cause came up across everything I read: cognitive overload from too much information on screen at once. When multiple questions are visible simultaneously, working memory splits between parsing which question to answer, tracking which have been completed, and deciding whether to proceed in order. None of that mental work helps the patient answer more accurately. It just adds friction until they give up. Progressive disclosure, one question per screen, removes all of it.
The research also pointed to five other specific problems with the original layout: no visible progress (patients had no idea how long the form was, which creates completion anxiety; the Zeigarnik Effect means showing progress already made significantly increases the drive to finish); scroll-to-continue navigation (no confirmation moment that an answer registered; explicit Next and Start Over buttons fix this); under-sized touch targets (a numbered text row on mobile is too small to tap accurately; the circular button grid brings every target above Apple's 44×44px minimum); dense front-loaded instructions (instructions scroll out of view before patients reach the questions they apply to; separating them and adding a contextual ? button makes help available exactly when needed); and no visual hierarchy (all text at the same weight means eyes don't know where to land; large section headings and distinct input elements solve this). The design exploration started with multi-question layouts (top-left in the board below) before the single-question structure became the clear answer. Each answered question then becomes a discrete, countable step forward, which is what unlocked the gamification model.
Each PRWE question occupies its own screen. Tapping Next advances to the next question and fills in a heart, progress always visible at the top. The intent was to make completion feel manageable: one question, one action, one step forward.
Green-to-red is the instinctive choice for any scale, but it asks the wrong question. Green implies "perfect" or "better than normal." For someone in wrist rehabilitation, that framing is dishonest: they may never return to fully pain-free function. The scale needed to ask "does this hurt, or does it feel normal?" Not "how far are you from perfect?"
Pain intensity questions use a blue-to-red gradient: blue anchors the low end as neutral and calm (the absence of pain, not an achievement), transitioning through purple to red at the high end: hurt, urgent, stop. The original green-to-red was tested and rejected; green at zero reads as "good" or "safe," which misrepresents how a recovering patient should interpret no pain on a given day. A pure blue-only direction was also explored for difficulty questions, but it read too softly against the background; the low contrast made the scale hard to parse, so the same blue-to-red gradient was kept for both question types. After seeing the final scale, physicians at Linköping specifically praised it.
A doctor consultation note was added to high-pain responses: a prompt to contact their physician if they noticed unusual or unexpected pain. This was a deliberate catch for patients who might push too hard in rehab and underreport to meet expectations. The form needed to signal clearly that the data existed to help them, not to grade their performance.
Scale variants explored
Shape variants
Alternative style
Blue only scale for function
Final painscale
Explored functionality scale
The graphic profile was a collaboration between me and another team member, and it needed to feel like it already belonged to the patient's treatment environment before they even opened the app for the first time.
We based the visual language directly on Linköping University Hospital's website and brand, pulling from the colour palette and visual patterns the institution already used. For patients who would be completing the form repeatedly as part of ongoing care, the app needed to feel like an extension of their treatment context, not a separate product someone had designed independently. Grounding it in the hospital's own tones made that continuity immediate rather than something that had to be built over time.
For the progression metaphor, we landed on water rising as the patient completes sessions over weeks of rehabilitation. Water carries no medical connotation, requires no explanation, and reads as progress intuitively regardless of age or background. The physicians at Linköping praised it specifically: it felt like recovery, not administration. Within each session, hearts mark question-by-question progress through the 15-item form, one per question, filling with colour on completion, with grayed-out ones ahead showing exactly how much remains.
Graphic profile
Water fills on completion
Hearts to indicate form progression: from exploring to deciding
Research into medical form completion shows people are significantly more likely to finish when they can see exactly how far they've come, and how little remains. The 15 hearts (one per PRWE question) deliver both: each filled heart marks progress, the grayed-out ones show exactly what remains. Three directions were explored before landing on hearts.
Dots
Heartbeat
Hearts: chosen ✓
Hearts (chosen)
