HealthCo
Project: Mobile App
Role: UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher
Duration: 4 months
Tools: Figma, Miro
Find the care you need.
The Problem
How might we ease the overwhelming feeling people get when trying to find and book a doctor?
Studies show that many people struggle to find a doctor within their needs and this led to people not getting the care they needed. My research helped me to see that “simply” searching on Google resulted in cognitive overload due to the abundance of options that needed to be filtered through. Due to these overwhelming and outdated methods, many users just end up avoiding it until their health is at serious risk.
The Solution
An all-in-one mobile app.
HealthCo makes finding and booking doctors within users' needs and wants easy, all in the reach of one’s fingertips.
Ability to input location and insurance before searching for specific doctor types.
Filter option to conduct searches with your preferences
Ratings and reviews to ensure credibility and trust and even offers featured doctors as a suggestion to ease the online options.
Clean, easy to scan, and has a simple and fast booking path.
HealthCo takes the user through the search and booking process step by step. Users simply need to choose within their filtered preferences and availability what kind of doctor they want to book with.
MY APPROACH
Understand (Secondary Research, Competitor Analysis, User Interviews)
Define (Affinity Map, Empathy Map, Personas, HMW Statements)
Ideate (Brainstorm, User Story, Site Map, User Flow, Red Routes)
Prototype (Sketches, Lo-fi + Hi-fi Wireframes, Prototype)
Validate (Usability Tests)
Understand
Key Insights from Secondary Research
Statistically difficult to find and make appointments with primary care physicians in the US because of the lack of PCP doctors compared to the number of patients in need (source)
Physical shortage of doctors due to less students pursuing the medical field (source)
Information online about doctors and clinics are not up to date
Key Insights from Primary Research
In order to better understand the problem space, I conducted 5 user interviews.
Some of my questions were about the frequency of their search, their methods, how they feel about the search and said methods, and what their ideal process would look like.
The most used methods were Googling, looking through their own health insurance site, and asking friends/family.
Majority felt that the search process was tedious and overwhelming
Nearly everyone's ideal process consisted of something more fast, easy, and reliable.
Define
To further understand, I conducted a heuristic analysis on 3 main competitors ZocDoc, K Health, and myCigna to help optimize usability across similar apps in the market.
Which led me to formulate these key questions:
How Might We…
Ease the overwhelming feeling people get when trying to find and book a doctor?
Create credibility and trust for the people who are skeptical of finding/booking doctors online?
Help people to better prioritize their health?
Develop
The affinity map defined for me that:
Time was a big constraint, life is busy
Because it was time-consuming, overwhelming, and frustrating this deterred people from searching
Users acknowledged health was important but found it difficult to easily access healthcare
There are trust issues in finding credibility with online information
Target User
During my guerrilla testing, emphasis on the importance of reviews and ratings were brought up frequently which led me to prioritize implementing them and making it more visible and known to the users. This led me to focus on specific features and not worry too much about the UI just yet.
Visual Design Process
Before heading into high fidelity wireframes and prototyping, I started with a mood board. The goal was to keep the interface clean and simple. I chose blue as my main color because I wanted to emit a feeling of calm and trust. This led to my finalized design system.
View the working prototype here
View the full Usability Test Plan here
Validate
First Round
In conducting the first test, I learned that the majority of the users really wanted a confirmation page after pressing the ‘Book Appointment’ button. After pressing the button, the screen goes back to the home page and nearly every user voiced confusion and uncertainty if they clicked the right thing. Several of them felt unsatisfied with the end of their task.
Through this finding, I implemented a confirmation screen with not only a big green checkmark but with additional resources for extra confirmation such as the ability for the user to add to their personal calendar.
Second Round
In the second round, the new set of participants all commented how great and reassuring it was to see the confirmation screen post booking. However, there was another moment of this occurrence when using the filter feature.
In the first round of testing, users really wanted to filter from highest rating to lowest. After implementing it and testing it in this round, all the users did find it useful but the issue of confirmation came up again. They needed a “search results” button to be sure that their filter preferences were working.
This taught me that basic core user needs such as reassurance and validation are just as integral to the user flow than simply mapping out the red routes. I now know to prioritize this need when designing for users in the future.
Reflections
I learned the importance of user needs through user testing, how to balance UI and UX design, and the importance of high-impact design decisions. I realized designing in isolation led to lack of interaction with users which didn’t help my designs help them. I came to recognize that the details are important but not to get too lost in them. What I would do differently, is prioritize making high-impact design decisions, integrate more user testing and feedback throughout instead of getting too carried away in UI exploration but to stay on the course of the red routes.