Patient Discovery
Medical Tech
Design experience for elderly people with rare diseases.
6 Months
Design a way to for patients to gather their thoughts or guide them in the direction to have informed conversations with their providers, remove confusion, drop-offs, and confusions.
After interviews and discussions, providers have said that they want their patients to open up more about their personal lives. This information can help them provide patients with support and most of the time free. Patients do not want to open up to strangers. This communication gap can help both sides achieve more informative conversations and better patient success.
Challenge
Doctors want to help patients for free
Providers, in all aspects of medicine, want their patients to open up about what is going on in their lives. If patients opened up to their doctors, doctors can help them find resources that can assist patient in their day to day life styles.
Challenge
Patients don't want to open up
Patients don't want to open up to strangers, even if those strangers are their doctors. Speaking about personal information can be intemedating to anyone. Even if we're not sick, just opening up to a stranger is slow. For example, when two people meet that could be potentially a relationship, they don't open up about all their feelings, problems, situations, and more at first, this could scare people away. It take time to open up. But in case for patient, specially in the rare disease, they might not have a lot of time left, and doctors want to help them, and most cases they are a lot of free resources out there that can help patients
Opportunity
New way to open up at the first meet
This came up as a way to design a unique experience that can break the ice between the patient and provider. A way that can satisfy both parties, for the patient to open up and the provider to help.
I started gathering ideas from across the internet.
Websites, apps, mobile apps. Reading in vlogs, watching videos, scrolling through social media for new trends. This explorations brought thoughts that can be used for explorations to the upcoming user testing and surveys. In the end I had gather enough images, videos, data to create a board of ideas.
From brainstorming, all the data is narrowed down to by surveys and interview with colleges and in person.
Wireframes emerged to give testers ideas where I was heading. in this instinct, I took a social media approach of feed to star designs.
Using user testing and in-person testing, I sent out multiple clickable prototypes of the wireframes. To gather feedback on what can be improved, removed, or changed.
Some of the feedback I got:
"Too social media like"
"People are tired of this structure, we see them across multiple platforms"
"It's Amazing, people are used to this"
Gathering feedback from developers during our stand-up and meetings.
Some suggested to use already build components to build upon. This opened up ideas on companonents in the design system to explore. We have used grid systems to list systems that we can use and move away from the social media structure. This grid list idea can speed up the selection of what users can choose to share with their providers and still have options to write in on their on
Using prototyping tools and developing a more advance clickable prototype, I was able to quickly send out testing rounds with new designs.
These can be used to determine if the direction we were going was right or not. But again failed once the investors pitched in in feedback. User Testing, In-house all agree it was a great idea to use component already made but investors believed that this was going to seem like its been used before and can lead to boredom and potential drop-offs.
Going back to the drawing board was difficult and some what of a baby downer.
I had been on this for quite some time and I my self started to fatigue. But there has to be a way to make this a unique experience that users can relate and want to used it over and over again. With some research and brainstorming and with some break in between, I was able to break through the ice of fatigue and fall in love with a new idea again. I had to through away my arrogance and thoughts and design something, becuae this was not for the in the end, this was for patients and future users of our platform.
Ideas of workflow were set in place to be able to place designs into.
A simple yet informative IA would help the design team come up with designs and interactions of upcoming designs. These of course can be altered in the future. Nothing was set in stone.
Designing quick mockups of ideas can identifying its experience will help guide viewers
Instead of simple mockups, since my team has already 2 other round of mockups, I decided to increase the fidelity of the designs, not full colored designs, but just a little more fidelity. This was going to help them more to see the direction where I was going.
After gathering all teams, design, project manager, tech, and 1 officer and presenting the following direction I got the following feedback
"This is it"
"You figure it out!"
"I think this is going to be a great start, but let's get it finalized and ready for development"
"I think we should get these into patients hands right away"
Using data gathered from patients, testings and in-person, I was able to populate the dummy text with real world data.
The feeb anck was immensely great. Now it's time to perfect the designs for developer hand-off. Using out brand identity and design systems, I was able to take the mockups and turn them into high fidelity designs for a final review and dev hand-off.
Finally after months of back and forth, a simple yet intuitive experience that user can come when they want and add things they want to talk to their doctors about
All this information is getting gathered for they upcoming appointments. And with out platform being High-Trust Certified, we have hospitals EHR hooked up to our platform. The doctor will be able to see and review any of this information before they patients meet them, to have informed discussions and decisions.
