I decided to take a look at some companies and people who work alongside healthcare and the impact their designs have on helping provide a better user experience.
At Big Motive, they work to help shape how the governments, clinicians, technologists and patients work together to achieve complete mental and physical health. They do this by using research to create human centred health by design. Some of the products and services they work on for companies include Patient-facing tools to help manage medical conditions, New opportunities for medical technologies and New end to end health-focused services.
During the COVID Pandemic in 2020, Big Motive designed Northern Ireland's digital contact tracing app, this was the world's first working cross border solution and first contact tracing app for usage by 11 - 17 year olds. They were able to engage with Health & Social Care in Northern Ireland to co-design a contact tracing proximity app that would be safe, secure, reliable and user friendly. This was so important to the volume and variety of people in Northern Ireland who would be using the solution.
They started prototyping designs and testing them with the public, senior stakeholders and human rights organisations as soon as possible so they were able to constantly gather vital feedback and insights which could be implemented iteratively before the final public-facing version was agreed.
This app works by notifying the user automatically if they have been in close contact with an app user who has added a positive COVID-19 test result to their app. Who they are a close contact with remains anonymous due to the app not collecting this information and will never know users’ identity or location. Instead they use the ‘Exposure Notification API’ developed by Apple and Google in a joint effort to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing.
When it came to updating the app, Big Motive developed a second version which was able to be used by 11-17 year olds. They used the same public-centred design approach again and recruited a users between this age bracket from all over Northern Ireland to get involved in a series of user interviews and research. This user research allowed them to pinpoint the exact insights they required to create the best solution possible for this age group. This version also tailored the information so that it was more age-appropriate information and encouragement throughout all stages to speak to a parent or guardian.
<aside> 💭 As a user of this app, I found it very simple and easy to use when needed. It provides a very easy experience to not only input the data when you become positive but also delivers the news in a way that isn’t overwhelming in that situation. I like that it keeps the overall experience easy and straightforward and although it is an app we all never hope to use, it played a very important part in helping prevent the spread of COVID in Northern Ireland. Overall I really like Big Motives designs as they use a slick user interface to enhance the user experience of their products and services.
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Design for Health - Big Motive
Through my research I found Katie McCurdy, a UX Designer, Researcher and Strategist who focuses her work on healthcare. She freelances offering clients who need support in User experience design, research and strategy, Product management, Human-centred and service design and UX Writing.
Katie has worked with many areas of the design and healthcare industries including a health non-profit, design agencies and an academic medical centre meaning she has been able to observe many different settings, collect in depth user research and develop a deep understanding of the problems many patients face as well as being able to apply her own personal experiences and other research to identify the pain points that people face within health care.
One of her projects which really stood out to me was redesigning the medical bill for UVM Medical Centre. This came about as the problem of medical bills being difficult to read especially for important details like how much was due, when it was due, whether or not you were behind on your payments or what to do if you needed help. This lead Katie and her team to research through interviews with patients and conducting usability tests which allowed them to gather a lot of insight on things such as the difficulty of receiving 2 letters from one hospital but 2 different departments and the confusion that comes with it for patients especially when they arrived at 2 separate times.
Other insights they gained included:
People assumed first page of the bill was a summary of charges, when it was actually the start of the detailed charges. Their eyes went straight to the detailed charge listing.
No one noticed that the account was past due — it didn’t pop out
Total amount due and due date were hard to see
Financial Assistance/reduced payment info was hard to find
Font & contrast issues; our font was too small for low vision.
This lead them to outlining the patient experience principles they wanted to set out to achieve such as “It’s easy to see how much I owe and what the bill is for” and “The layout is clean and calming.” By using this, it enabled them to prototype and test designs which would improve the patients experience and include new key enhancing features such as strong colours, contrasts and highlighting the status of the patients accounts.