Discussing How Innovative Product Design Enhances User Experience in the Healthcare Industry with Chief Product Officer, David Yu

Now that the healthcare space is seeing such rapid innovation, it is more important than ever to design products that work for the end user in mind. A product can be anything. From a tangible object like shoes or a car to something intangible like a website or software. No matter the product, two things remain at the core of any good product rollout — knowing your customer and having a strong strategy to reach them. David Yu, ixlayer’s Chief Product Officer and 25 year product management veteran, knows this all too well.

A common thread throughout his experience from Stitcher, Helix, and One Kings Lane has been using technology, data, and great design to deliver innovative experiences to users. David continues that work with ixlayer, bringing his vast knowledge and expertise to the healthcare industry that sees everyone in the world as a potential customer that can benefit from well-designed products.

We sat down with David to get his unique POV on health-tech products, user interfaces, and where we go from here.

What is most exciting to you about how quickly the health tech landscape has changed?

What excites me is the “consumerization” of health-tech products in the last few years. User-centered design is no longer unique to social media or e-commerce. I have seen and used great digital health products in the last few years focusing on patient engagement and digital therapeutics designed by “digital native” product developers. Users now expect and demand intuitive interfaces and frictionless experiences.

Have you seen a change since the COVID-19 pandemic?

The most obvious change since COVID-19 has been the accelerated adoption of digital healthcare experiences. Whether it’s telemedicine, e-prescribing, at-home testing, or digital therapeutics, the pandemic most likely accelerated the adoption by close to a decade. Whether these changes will stick around after COVID abates still remains to be seen but that’s why it’s such an exciting field to be in right now. We have a rare opportunity to experiment and prove the value of these new products at scale for health systems and patients in the near future.

For those that may be unfamiliar, please give us a brief explanation of population scale testing?

Population scale testing refers to the data collection process via testing across a wide swath of participants that allows us to better understand the health impact across a large population or confirm correlations between health conditions and certain outcomes.

How has population scale testing evolved since your time at Helix?

There have been more novel tests developed since my days at Helix but the biggest change has been the sheer volume of tests conducted since the start of COVID. Testing is now part of our daily vernacular and billions of dollars have poured into this space to help ensure our safety and wellbeing. Governments, schools and private enterprises now understand the importance and benefits of population scale testing and how to leverage the data it generates.

You previously worked at MLB and Gilt, two major brands hyper-focused on the consumer experience. Can you talk about how web design and the Internet has made for a better experience for consumers?

Any product we build is ultimately in service of those who will be using it. Product design is about developing that deep user empathy and creating not just a usable product but one that is delightful to experience. Over the last couple of decades, so many UX design patterns have been established through the most popular products/apps that we interact with on a daily basis.

Instead of discussing good design, think about how our tolerance for “bad” UX design in the health space has decreased over the last few years. I’m sure you’ve wondered why you had to enter your insurance information yet again just because you walked down the street to a different pharmacy or why you have to fill out a patient intake form every time you visit your doctor. Imagine a world where getting a cholesterol test at home can be as simple as ordering a new phone charger on Amazon.

How can the health industry apply some of these lessons to better serve patients?

A good UX is good UX, regardless of whether it’s for a travel booking app or an interface to schedule your next doctor’s appointment. There are great design patterns we interact with every day that have been established that are agnostic to the industry you are designing in. Here at ixlayer, we can be designing a new patient enrollment flow or an admin interface. The same design principles apply as long as we focus on the end users.

What are the most important innovations we should look to keep going into 2022?

Going into 2022, I think it’s less about the pace of innovation and more about keeping the incredible momentum going for health-tech adoption. COVID has given us an opportunity to dramatically change the way we manage our own health and engage in various healthcare services with unprecedented access to new products with troves of data. I’m personally excited about the chance to reinvent how patients, providers, retailers and other organizations access and interface with health testing via the ixlayer platform.

What will healthcare look like in the next 10 years?

I do not have a crystal ball, but my personal hope is that healthcare in the next decade will be affordable, universally accessible, outcome-based and gives patients control over their own health.