My Role was to consult and develop a product design strategy for a new health care startup.
I collaborated with a team of entrepreneurs, medical experts and investors during the ideation phase of this project.
one stop medical appointment manager
To make an appointment with your doctor mostly requires a phone call that must be made during office hours. It can become complicated when the patient has to make several follow up appointments with the lab, the specialist, the pharmacy, the therapist etc. Today one has to log into multiple online portals as each health care provider uses their own service to communicate with their patients. This is a frustrating and time consuming experience for the patient but also can become costly for the doctor when appointments are missed.
In an initial strategy meeting with stakeholders the business requirements were discussed.
The company's commercial model is based on a subscription fee for health care providers that seek to gain a more direct access to their customers. Therefore it is key that the MEDassist app for patients can drive high adoption and retention rates.
The resulting KPIs that are relevant for the product design are:
-
the amount of sign ups
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number of appointments being scheduled through the app
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number of generated notifications and alerts
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number of reschedules and cancellations processed via the app
The goal is to design a product that allows a healthcare seeker to manage all appointments in a single place and reminds of any upcoming visit.
In the initial Research phase, I was provided with a body of data and material allowing me to quickly familiarize myself with the subject matter. I looked at the most common health care plans available to customers. It quickly became clear that MEDassist's value proposition aims primarily at a person with a PPO plan where as a person with an HMO plan, going to Kaiser Permanente for example, might have a lesser need for this product.
Therefore put my focus on a typical experience of a patient using a health plan provided by Anthem Blue Shield. The freedom of choice a PPO plan offers can quickly become a quite complicated task to manage if a visit at the general physician requires follow ups, blood work or referrals to a specialist.
I decided that a user journey map is best suited to visualise the potential complexity of managing multiple appointments. It also shows the mental and emotional challenge while the person is going through each phase of the journey.
Since the user journey map revealed a variety of potential use cases the team defined the most common ones. As an example: in the "Doctor + Lab" scenario a patient is scheduled a follow up in 4 weeks. It's important that the results of a blood test are available to the doctor by then. The patient does not immediately call the lab as 4 weeks are plenty of time and ends up forgetting about it.
In this case MEDassist would look at the follow up date and the submitted lab order entered by the doctor. It calculates a deadline for a lab test to be done in time before the next doctor visit. A reminder would then automatically be sent to the patient's phone at a date that still allows for enough days to make an appointment. The user then opens the MEDassist app and chooses a day and time to go to the lab.
Another step in the Analytical phase was the creation of personas. As stated earlier the
app primarily targets persons with
PPO plans. Thus anyone in their
working age between 18 and 65
is our target audience.
From the young single
to families, all the way
to someone close to
retirement
- a vast spectrum of
user groups needed
to be captured.
“I have a lot of things on my
plate and a busy social schedule.
Without reminders on my phone I'd be lost.”
Melissa (41) Office Manager
Based on the defined use cases I developed a ux-flowchart to map out all necessary steps a user has to take in order to accomplish a task. This diagramm sequenced all the user interactions along the underlying logic of the app, from responding to an alert, creating an appointment to receiving a confirmation etc.
The flowchart also came in handy during the discussions with the engineering team. I needed to understand any technical restrictions or requirements that would affect the user flow. It further allowed us to identify the most crucial functions for the MVP and the features slated for later releases.
During the ideation process I presented the team wireframes outlining various design proposals. After a few iterations we aligned on a concept that created the most seamless experience across laptops and mobile devices.
The biggest challenge was to design an experience that made it easy for the user to handle the set up and appointment management process. Simplicity can be achieved through various techniques like organizing the underlying information architecture into categories, progressive reveal etc. Thus appointments were grouped into sections labeled future, next and past. I took a "one step at a time" approach and put the visual focus only on the next appointment. Within this section an alert informed the user of the actions to take and arranged all available options below. Just one single click enabled the user to schedule the next visit.
The wireframes and some low fidelity mocks were turned into simple click through prototypes to be used for usability testing.
Our design concept for the app had to be validated before the next step of development. We recruited a handful of volunteers that approximately matched the profile of the previously defined personas to participate in a workshop.
During the session we walked through each step of the app, did a small role play and gathered feedback through discussion and targeted questions.
The results allowed us to identify problem areas we were then able to address in a subsequent iteration of our concept.
"I liked that I could set up an appointment with my doctor 24/7, even on weekends. What I found a little difficult to find was the option to send the notifications also to my other mobile devices."
Barbara (21)
In the final step I provided high fidelity mocks for visual design and branding. A splash page needed to communicate the MED assist service in an easy manner and drive registration.
The validated wireframes guided the layout of the appointment manager UI.
A consistent look & feel was essential for the recognition of the app service across platforms in its various appearances as alerts on mobile screens as well as the website on a laptop. Together with marketing I worked on branding elements like logo, color scheme and delivered a style guide to ensure consistency for any future designs.
In conclusion, if the company can bring enough healthcare providers onto their platform, the experience of scheduling and managing medical appointments will be profoundly changed. Once the app is in the hand of a real user, it will be important to capture their feedback. Therefore I recommended to integrate survey functionality and/or a feedback channel. The measurement of the aforementioned KPIs will be a first indicator.
Even with a developed concept for MEDassist, the product needs to be flexible enough to overcome unexpected challenges. An issue could arise that initially not all labs or specialists are available through the app. In such a situation the MVP could focus only on individual appointments. The workshop has shown that users appreciated the opportunity to schedule an appointment at any time they want, instead of waiting until opening hours.
On the other hand, MEDassist has a great potential for further innovation. What if a pharmacy can also set up alerts through the app, reminding the user to take their medicine? With each release MEDassist has the opportunity to improve their product by enhancing established features, remove ineffective ones and introduce new ideas to make it a success.