“It’s all about communication.”
I would like to understand how people feel about and engage in their relationship with personal healthcare. I would like to understand ways to better facilitate the relationship between the individual and their healthcare provider.
Communication is at the center of every positive relationship. yourHealth is a solution for building effective and personal relationships between users and their healthcare providers. yourHealth’s mission is to empower patients to receive the best healthcare experience possible.
OVERVIEW
RESEARCH
The purpose of this study is to understand ways to facilitate the relationships between the individual and their healthcare provider and to understand how people feel about and engage in their relationship with their personal health and how that relationship could change their overall health.
My research explored four areas including:
Secondary Research findings where I explored the problem space.
Primary research development where I utilized affinity mapping, empathy mapping, and personas
Identifying insights to further understand the research AND FINALLY
Discovering opportunities for design through the development of How might we questions to better understand the challenges facing the user.
In my secondary research I was interested in understanding a range of topics including the perspectives of both the user or consumer and the healthcare providers themselves.
As resources I researched blog posts, trade publications, online journals, and press coverage to better understand research being conducted and general perspectives of the problem space.
From this research I developed a screener survey which received 21 responses and included questions to help understand how actual users receive and initiate their personal healthcare as well as their general feelings about the healthcare they recieve.
The target users I was seeking must have received healthcare in the last 12 months and have consistent internet access with video capability.
From the survey I identified and then interviewed 7 participants for approximately 30 minutes each in which we discussed more specifically their experiences setting up appointments, going to the doctor, finding new doctors, contacting new and existing doctors, and accessing their healthcare records.
Additionally we discussed things that positively or negatively impact their healthcare experience as well as the perception of the information they receive from their doctor.
It was important to me as I sought out participants that they represented a full range of age and gender so that I could understand areas of overlap between demographics.
I utilized Affinity Mapping to better understand and align the wide range of responses I received from the interviews I conducted.
I identified several themes including:
Healthcare deterrents
Patient friction
Experiences with virtual health
Concerns over insurance and cost
The ways people currently communicate with their doctor and what they require of that communication
How people find new doctors
And interestingly several areas that suggest frustration and distrust of doctors including:
Negative aspects of current doctors
General distrust of providers AND
Sometimes apathy toward their doctors or aspects of their healthcare.
Certain threads began standing out, such as:
I hated my primary care doctor
They only see their specialist for 5 minutes while the rest of the two hours is spent waiting AND
That they usually don’t get all of the information they’re asking for.
From the Affinity mapping I built an Empathy Map to better capture the interview participants behaviors, attitudes and pain points when engaging in healthcare and personal health.
Key findings that stood out from the empathy map include:
That users are frustrated and that they feel that healthcare information is very hidden and That they would like a standardized rating system for doctors.
I also identified that users are looking for some similarities to other customer service experiences such as being able to go online and make reservations.
That they feel rushed when talking to the doctor.
And that by and large most people i interviewed would rather talk with the doctor online for 5 minutes than use an hour or more of their day in person.
And that some users are so used to the way their healthcare experience has been in the past that they have simply accepted it.
PERSONA
To assist me in identifying the best way to approach the How might we questions I developed the persona of Peyton Patient.
Healthcare is more or a less a universal necessity so Peyton represents an average of the typical healthcare user. He or She is approximately 45 years old, has experience with healthcare, doctors, and healthcare applications.
Peyton is not resistant to receiving healthcare but has had several issues with healthcare and their doctors in the past such as not being able to find a doctor that is close to home or work that meets their demographic needs such as gender, orientation, or background, OR they’ve had a hard time communicating with their doctor to get important questions answered.
Overall Peyton values communication and wants to feel like they have a voice in their healthcare experience
IDEATION
Once our persona of Peyton was established we could ask some more questions to better focus our design decisions.
First, How could people most effectively make appointments while using a patient portal?
Then, How does the inclusion of physician demographics when searching for a new doctor improve personal health?
And lastly which features are important in patient portals and which aren’t?
HOW MIGHT WE…
Through our user interviews we found several outstanding concerns with the way people were typically engaging in healthcare.
They usually felt like they weren’t sure of the best way to get in touch with their doctors; they had a really hard time finding new doctors that they felt comfortable with; and they felt their experiences of healthcare were at odds with other customer service relationships they experienced while going to restaurants, shopping, or getting their haircut.
These frictions led directly to our How Might We questions/concerns.
MVP & USER STORIES
To define our MVP (Minumim Viable Product) we utilized user stories to define the basic functional needs of yourHEALTH.
A few key journeys began to emerge. We found that Peyton:
Wants to send a message to their doctor so they can ask questions and be assured they’ll get a response
Wants to be able to see a calender so they can figure out when is best for them to go to the doctor
And that when looking for a doctor they’d like to be able to find an office close to home or work and also be able to find someone who meets specific demographic criteria, which could include whether the doctor is male or female, has served in the military, or is an LGBTQ+ ally among other things.
One of the core tenets of this project is ease and accessibility; for those reasons I chose a mobile first approach.
These user stories helped us to develop the core journeys our users would typically take
when interacting with a healthcare app.
They include:
Finding a new doctor
Sending a message to a new or current doctor
And booking an appointment.
Since users of all ages and demographics will be using this application it was important to keep things clear, trustworthy, and in some cases redundant. Our users include digital natives and digital immigrants so we needed to make sure to remember that as we were entering the design stages of the project.
Lo Fi EVOLUTION
As we were iterating we found the home dashboard to be the most critical screen for the user’s journeys.
We found that we needed to include common features in an easy to reach location on the screen, and that we needed to include redundancy in some areas of interaction such as allowing users to send a message from a messages home screen, a provider dashboard, or when selecting a new doctor.
You can see in the first iteration the only CTA’s included on the dashboard were upcoming and recent events and a wellness card.
Through testing we found that important features such as My Providers and Find a Doctor were important to have on the dashboard as well, even though it did add a significant number of potential choices to the user interactions.
For the low fidelity design process we first developed several basic iterations of potential dashboards through sketching and ideation exercises and then moved on to guerilla usability testing with the Marvel Pop app.
From the hand drawn sketches we moved on to lo fidelity wireframes to further flesh out
the design decisions.
V1 Was essentially a direct digital mockup of the sketched screen while v2 started considering clickable content and location identifiers for the user such as indicators in the toolbar.
Hi Fi EVOLUTION
The hi fi evolution occurred in three phases, the first was a more complete version of the wireframe which began to consider color and imagery.
The second iteration was developed internally and introduced additional imagery to identify primary CTA’s, a location indicator on the toolbar, and more specific buttons for secondary dashboards.
The last iteration further simplified the toolbar and added helper text, removed the recent events card, and added functionality to the myHealth and My Providers dashboards.
Round 1 Testing
During round 1 testing we received very valuable feedback from our testers.
Several key takeaways were:
That they didn’t know what the my providers card was for
They weren’t sure who they’d be talking to if they were to use the chat feature
And That the icons were a little confusing but not a dealbreaker...but definitely not very clear.
Some positive feedback we received was that they found the colors to be fitting for a healthcare app because it reminded them of doctors offices and they really liked how personal the application felt with the greetings, light but not silly or showy interactions, and that they could personalize the app with their picture and home or work addresses.
Round 1 User Insights
Round 2 Testing
During our second round of testing it was immediately evident that these changes greatly increased the journey success rate for users through all of the journeys we tested.
Our testing processes included remote moderated testing, Maze unmoderated testing, and a remote cardsort through Optimal Workshop.
During our testing we found that:
As i mentioned before user success was greatly increased in all journeys.
And that the recent events card didn’t really seem necessary.
We also concluded that the chat feature caused too much distrust so it was definitively removed.
We also found that the journey confirmation screens needed more consistency to insure that users felt resolved in the journeys
Overall though we found that users found our application to be trustworthy, easy to use, and perhaps most importantly that it would encourage them to get healthcare more frequently...which is really exciting!
Round 2 User Insights
UI PROCESS
A key element in my design and iteration process was the use of Figma, components, and self-built UI kits so that I could quickly and efficiently iterate on designs based on user research and feedback.
SUMMARY
This has been an exciting and rewarding research journey into the ways people communicate with their doctors and more importantly how people would like to communicate with their doctors.
Through my use of secondary research to better understand the problem space I found that the healthcare industry is working toward methods and implementations to facilitate telehealth and virtual health, but there is a fair amount of resistance to change at the provider level, especially with doctors who have been practicing for a long time.
By using a screener survey and subsequent interviews I was able to develop my primary research through a series of affinity maps, empathy maps, and a user persona that helped me to better understand the friction people have when receiving healthcare or trying to receive healthcare, as well as what aspects people find important when choosing a doctor and actually going to the doctor’s office.
Multiple rounds of testing sketches, lo fidelity mockups, and ultimately hi fidelity mockups led me to produce a product that puts the user, the person, at the forefront of their healthcare experience.
Testing was by far the most influential element of this project and helped me to put away assumptions and complete the task most important as a UX designer…listening.