maria-ramirez 

Vision - App for eye patients

🌐 Challenge

Eye patients often feel anxious and insecure before and after medical procedures, they make recurring phone calls and visits to the hospital to request information about care practices and documentation. This situation generates frustration for both patients and healthcare personnel. Some consequences of this challenge are duplicated tasks by hospital staff and patients’ dissatisfaction.

🎯 Goal

To increase the customer satisfaction of eye patients by helping them to help themselves during their medical journey through a streamlined way to manage medical documents, learn relevant self-care practices, and stay on top of essential requirements.

Intial prompt: “Design a customer service app for a hospital in your hometown”

Understanding the user

USER RESEARCH

Upon receiving the prompt, I was aware of its complexities, therefore I decided to focus on a specific area: a hospital that exclusively attends ophthalmological patients. I managed to establish contact with one of the hospital managers who provided me with information, under strict care, to work on the project.

Afterwards, I proceeded to deconstruct the problem space it into subproblems, which I tackled by establishing a research goal.

1. The who, what, where, when and why of customer service in an Eye Hospital.

2. What does it mean to provide an outstanding customer service in healthcare?

3. What are the specific requirements of customer service in healthcare in a small town in Latam?

Problem discovery

To understand the problem area, I gathered information about the Eye Hospital’s health services and customer service.

Eye Hospital’s Customer Service areas and channels:

AREA

General user service 

Private user service

Appointment center

Surgical user service

CHANNEL

📧☎️📲🌐🗣

☎️📲🌐🗣

📧☎️📲🌐

📧📲🗣

AGENTS

(1)

(1)

(2)

(1)

Research goal

After getting a sense of the problem space and the health offer of the Eye Hospital, I was able to formulate a goal to frame the research work.

🎯  Understand the eye patients’ experience, their needs, and frustrations in relation to the customer service provided at the Eye Hospital.

Research methods

To address the research objective and subproblem questions, I applied a mix of research methods focused on understanding the patients’ experience and their perception of customer service.

METHOD

Expert interview

Desk research

Satisfaction report review

Analysis of PQR survey 

User interviews

Competitive audit

User testing

PHASE

Discovery research

Discovery research

Discovery research

Discovery research

Discovery research

Design research

Design research

SUM

(1)

(1)

(4)

(5)

(4)

(5)

Pain points

🗓

High difficulty scheduling an appointment over the phone.

📋

Lack of clarity with the preparation instructions for surgeries.

Dissatisfaction due to long waiting times before receiving medical care.

💬

Misinformation and confusion in the delivery of results.

By learning about patients’ needs, behaviors, likes, and dislikes, I prioritized certain needs for future design work. Out of a total of eleven (11) pain points, the following were prioritized. This prioritization was based on the outcomes of the eye hospital satisfaction survey accomplish by the hospital quality team in the months of June, July, and August 2021. (total of survey respondents 640)

User journey map

After conducting the interview with experts, the analysis of the annual satisfaction report, the analysis of requests and complaints, and the interviews with users, I defined 4 pain points, and finally proceeded to create the user journey map to identify new pain points and opportunities for improvement. 

I developed this process by analyzing every action the user takes on their vision health journey. The case I studied specifically, was that of a user who arrives at the eye hospital to request an ophthalmology appointment and is subsequently referred for outpatient cataract extraction surgery.

Problem statement

José is a retired salesman who needs an easy app experience to organize their medical documentation and control the medical instructions and recommendations because he is often confused and frustrated with the increasing amount of medical information he must manage through their medical journey.

To build the problem statement that describes the user needs that should be addressed, I used the 5 Ws framework. This model helped me focus on describing the context of the problem from the user’s perspective.

–> Who is experiencing the problem?

–> What are the pain points you are trying to solve?

–> Where is the user when they’re using the product?

–> Why is the problem important?

–> When does the problem occur?

Starting the design phase

Ideation

Going from the research phase to the design phase, I started with the ideation process. After empathizing with the users and defining the problem statement, I started brainstorming potential solutions. 

Finally, three of the brainstormed ideas were prioritized to design a solution. 

📂 DOCS MANAGEMENT

Scan, archive and easily find medical documents

📋 CHECKLISTS CONTROL

Ready-made checklists and personal lists to verify medical instructions

👨🏻‍💻 SELF-HELP HUB

Search bot and FAQ section to solve questions from anywhere

Information architecture

Before creating the first wireframes on paper, I designed a preliminary version of the information architecture of the customer service application for eye patients. This site map was subsequently modified after user testing.

Wireframes

Based on the information architecture, I created three paper wireframe versions of the app’s home screen and highlighted some features and elements to design a final version of this main screen. Later, I started to design the digital wireframes of the project.

Low-fidelity prototype

After finishing the digital wireframes, I moved on to generating the low-fi prototype focused on a user flow, the task of this flow is to find a ready-to-use checklist for the cataract extraction procedure.

💡Note: to interact with and see the prototype on a larger scale, you can click the “full screen” button in the upper right corner, which appears while you hover.

Usability studies

Next, I formulated a UX research plan to carry out the user testing. I wanted to learn how easy it was for users to find the ready-made checklists, so they can verify their important requirements before and after surgeries or medical appointments. Based on a list of prompts, I conducted a Moderated Usability Study which sessions lasted from 15 to 20 minutes, after the task completion the research participants filled a System Usability Scale form. 

🚶🏽‍♀️Participants: 5 – two males and three females – frequent patients of medical services between 27 and 65

🎯Research goal: Determine the elements of the ready-made checklists that are difficult to use or unappealing

During the users study  I tested the high-fidelity prototype.

Usability Testing Findings

To analyze the data collected in the user tests, I applied the affinity mapping method, which allowed me to generate three main themes.

Theme 1: People like to be guided step-by-step through their journey with clear and straight messages.

2 out of 5 participants felt confused or didn’t realize when they actually landed on the checklist screen and it was ready to use.

“I prefer to be guided by clear messages and buttons more than browsing. I think it would be easier with more communication” — Participant 1, Eye patient

Theme 2: People try to find target information by selecting the tool they see at first glance on the screen.

3 out of 5 participants tried to find the target information with the first option they saw. Most participants would like to have a quick and easy tool for finding information centrally located on the screen.

“I am the type of person that selects the first option that my eyes see, and as the filter option was in the middle of the screen I chose that path and wouldn’t notice that there are other options to find what I am looking for, for instance scrolling down” — Participant 3, Eye patient

Theme 3: People need clear clues to understand the possibilities offered by the application.

2 out of 5 participants said they did not understand the potential use of the app when they first saw the home screen.

“I would say it is about…I don’t know…It could be several things, it seems like something where you write an email or something” — Participant 5, Eye patient

Research Insights

✅ Well-defined step-by-step guides

Users need better cues, such as short, to-the-point messages that guide them to their target checklist.

🔎 First-glance accessible search tools 

Users need  options for searching and filtering information that save them time and effort and is centrally located.

💎 Onboarding to uncover the app’s value

Users need a first introduction to the app to comprehend its possibilities and features.

Design decisions examples

Insight P0: Clear guides step-by-step

Decision: to improve the written cues of interaction and navigation elements such as buttons to guide the users through the checklist selection process.

Insight P1: first-glance accessible search tools

Decision: to improve the labels of the search field and filter tool that are located in the center of the screen.

Refining the design

Design Kit

To start the high-fidelity prototyping design stage, I put together a design kit with the main elements of the graphical system for Vision App. I created this kit using Material Design. One of my purposes when doing this, was to make my work more suitable for collaboration with development.

Final solution

This product aims to improve the customer experience of patients before and after receiving medical attention in the Eye Hospital, by allowing them to manage their medical documentation, control medical instructions, and help themselves to solve doubts from anywhere.

Home screen

Vision’s home screen shows users the main sections of the app.

Here, they can visualize and access the document and checklists management tools and ask questions related to their visual health with the self-help search tool.

Multiple possibilities

In the navigation drawer, users have access to different destinations in the app.

This modal drawer allows the users to visualize the tools of the three main app sections in a list view.

Checklists screen

On the checklists main screen, users find access to the three main tools in this category: create a new checklist, access the full list of ready-to-use checklists, and access their own checklists.

Ready-to-use checklists

In this section, users have the ability to explore the entire collection of checklists.

These checklists are tagged according to procedure type, and users can search for the desired list with keywords or filter by procedure.

Category selection

With the category filter, users can easily find their target checklist by procedure category, namely, outpatient surgery, specialty consultation, medical procedure, diagnostic testing, or specialty laser surgery.

Taking the control

Finally, when users access the checklist of their interest, they can check and verify the different requirements and instructions to stay on top of essential requirements before and after their visual medical procedures.

Hi-fidelity prototype

Finally, I generated a high-fidelity prototype focused in one user flow, the flow’s task is to find a ready-to-use checklist for the cataract extraction procedure. 

💡Note: to interact with and see the prototype on a larger scale, you can click the “full screen” button in the upper right corner, which appears while you hover.

Going forward

Next steps

To keep working on this project I would continue as follows:

  • Second round of user testing using the high fidelity prototype.
  • Implementation of changes and improvements based on insights. 

What I learned

Throughout this project, I was able to learn about the different stages of the user-centered design process. I learned that every process is different and that the methods and tools we use to address problems and work on solutions can vary and be adjusted to the context.

Finally, I learned that a problem can be addressed in multiple ways, and that the most important is to promote paths that make sense to people.

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