inRange

The brief

inRange was my final project for the Graphical interface design course at the University of Trento, in the 2025–2026 academic year. I worked on it alone.

The brief imagined a pump maker that wants to improve daily life for the people who already use its device: less friction, fewer people giving up, more trust in the therapy.

The need

A person with type 1 diabetes on a pump wears it 24 hours a day, and the day is a chain of decisions. Before every meal they estimate the carbohydrates and give a bolus. During sport they change the basal rate or stop it. At night the pump can wake them with an alarm.

None of it stays the same for long. Food, exercise, stress, timing and even the weather move the glucose, so what worked yesterday may not work today.

13 pain points

I modeled the domain before drawing anything: the recurring activities, the states a day goes through, from routine to alarm to the low attention of the night, and the situations that strain it most, such as meals out, sport, water, technical faults and the set change.

That gave 13 pain points. Among them: alarms that sound in the wrong place, the fear of lows at night, a bolus forgotten before a meal, the fear of delivering insulin by mistake when tired, and never having the glucose in sight when it matters.

From them I built 3 personas, bottom up. Mara, 58, wants to feel in control at all times. Noemi, 20, lives in a rush and forgets things. Cristiano, 28, trains often and does not want to lose control while he does. They are not real people but attitudes, chosen to cover the night, the meals and the sport without overlapping.

What I left out

A step-by-step guide to changing the infusion set: after a few days it becomes routine. A daily checklist: days with diabetes are never standard, and an unticked list only blames. Advice on counting carbohydrates: food apps already do it, and it would move the focus from the pump to the plate.

The app also gives no clinical advice. It never calculates a dose and never decides the therapy on its own, and it is not a tool for the doctor.

State first

From the pain points came a few rules: clarity first, detail after; an alarm understood in a few seconds; few steps when it matters; and always knowing what is happening and what you just did.

So the home is a control panel. The glucose is the largest thing on the screen, with its trend. Below it, whether delivery is running, the pump and the sensor in 2 cards, and the last actions taken. A single button opens the actions: a bolus, sport mode, night mode.

3 moments

At night, Mara’s alarms say how serious they are before she opens anything: an icon, a color and one line. A low that needs action looks nothing like a sensor battery at half.

• UrgentHypoglycemia, 80 mg/dL. Take carbohydrates.

• To handleReplace the sensor. 10 hours left.

• For informationBolus delivered. 9 units.

At lunch, Noemi picks a saved meal and the dose she used last time is already there. She can change it, and a dialog asks her to confirm before any insulin is delivered. If she forgets the bolus, a reminder comes only in her meal hours, and only if the glucose is rising with nothing recorded.

Before training, Cristiano sets sport mode: whether the pump stays on him, whether to quiet the notifications, a temporary change to the basal rate, and when it starts and ends. A note reminds him to keep fast carbohydrates at hand.

Color that means something

The interface is built on Material 3, with a palette of my own. Material’s colors are accessible, but they do not carry a medical meaning, and here color is not decoration. Green means the therapy is running as it should, yellow and orange a temporary change such as sport or night mode, and red a critical alarm.

I also sketched the essential numbers outside the app: a lock-screen widget, a watch face and a car display, for the moments when the phone cannot be opened.

Where it stands

inRange ended as a report and a Figma prototype, one moment for each persona. What I keep from it is what I left out: in an app about insulin, every feature you add is one more thing to get wrong.