Case study: How we built a mid-fidelity prototype in 4 days as junior UX/UI designers
This case study was written as part of the Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp I followed in January—March 2021. We were assigned a brief to work on in a group of 3. Here is how, the first week of our bootcamp, we developed a solution in 4 days using Maze and Figma.
The solution exposed here was developed for educational purposes only.
Introduction
As technology is changing a lot of aspects in our lives for the better, one industry seems to remain immune to it (from the user perspective at least): the public health sector.
We’ve all experienced either first hand or second hand the struggles that come with public hospitals. That elevator music when making a call to book an appointment, only to be told the next available slot is in 2 weeks. The waiting 1 hour+ for your turn to meet the doctor in those cold, sterile-smelling waiting rooms at the hospital. That quick follow-up question you forgot to ask your doctor and now means having to go through that elevator music again. The process is always so tedious and leaves the patient in an anxious and uncertain state.
As 3 junior UX/UI designers, we investigated this issue and developed a Mid-Fi prototype of a mobile app that would help improve the process and bring patients and the medical staff closer.
Our design thinking process
We began our empathising phase by gathering what we already knew. To do so, we performed both primary and secondary research.
As junior UX Researchers, and given the 4-days time constraint we had, we first started our primary research with what was most accessible: our very own experiences and feelings dealing with hospitals and making appointments.
Personally, I found this part particularly hard to do as it had been awhile since I had been to a hospital or made an appointment to go see a doctor. So I started investigating and looking for what had already been done — any surveys or reports that had already been conducted on the topic. Several results came up, from a Marketing Research Report in Health Services Planning, or an article about the Top Challenges Impacting Patient Access to Healthcare, to the 2020 Deloitte Global Health Care Outlook Report. These reports written by market research and consulting agencies were not all relevant for our brief. They tackled public hospitals from an industry point of view and not so much from a consumer point of view. However, they were crucial in my ability to immerse myself in the ‘hospital journey’ and empathise better with patients.
From this point on, we were able to continue through the lean survey canvas: write down what we needed to learn, who from and how we would reach these people. Some clear questions to better understand patients’ pain-points that then structured our survey were:
- How to find out your doctor’s availability (live/actualised)
- Where do you go when you’re at the hospital
- Where/how to make a follow-up appointment
- How busy/long are the queues?/How long is the waiting time?
- How are people making appointments now?
Our survey included a screener question so that only people who had been to the hospital for a medical appointment responded. 21 persons responded, and we conducted 5 in-depth interviews. These qualitative interviews were very interesting as they allowed us to highlight 5 key pain points:
- People struggle with their feelings — mostly feelings of anxiousness and nervousness. These feelings were caused either by the general anxiety-inducing environment of hospitals, the uncertainty of where they need to go or what will happen.
- The preparation/organisation before they go for their appointment — patients often feel disoriented before going for their appointments, not knowing what documents to bring or how long the appointment they will take. This is particularly nerve-wracking when they have prepared several questions and don’t know if they will have time to go through them all with their doctors.
- Time — waiting times especially. One person we interviewed explicitly mentioned that they arrive early for their appointment. Other interviewees mention they would like to know exactly when it is their turn.
- Communication/relation with the medical staff — most of the people we interviewed mentioned that the lack of humanity from doctors left them feeling frustrated. The doctor had little time for a real, in-depth conversation with their patients, when the appointment was not interrupted by the phone ringing.
- Patients felt lost with the amount of medical files laying around — all the people we interviewed had to organise their medical files their own way, some already had digitised them, others still had theirs in paper format.
While an app can’t suppress these feelings and pain points entirely, it can help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed and help the patient feel more in control. We therefore needed to develop a mobile app that allows patients to centralise their medical documents, manage the scheduling and rescheduling of their appointments, and facilitate communication with medical staff.
As mentioned previously, patients expressed feeling unprepared prior to going to the hospital, oblivious regarding crowds at the hospital, out of touch with their doctor, lost when they had a follow-up question and frustrated at the disorganised storage of their medical documents.
Our problem statement therefore was to design an app that would allow patients to manage appointments, receive alerts from the hospital, store medical documents and easily contact a medical personnel. We have observed that no product on the market is dedicated to managing the end-to-end hospital visits. This is causing harm to the patient and distrust of public hospitals.
We believe developing this app for 20–40 year olds patients who have been to the hospital for medical reasons at least once will help the patient feel more in control, more engaged with their medical situation, and improve the communication with hospital staff.
To help us in developing the app, we created our user persona, Amanda Smith:
After sketching our Lo-Fi, we developed and tested our Mid-Fi prototype among users. We created 4 tasks for users to test on Maze, corresponding to the 4 screens we developed. All of 4 tasks had a 60%+ success rate among our testers.
The output
Below, you will find a video of the Mid/Hi-Fi prototype we built on Figma. The video takes you through the 3 main screens we built that we believe can help alleviate the pain points mentioned above:
- The QR code screen—from this screen, patients can let the hospital/doctor know when they have arrived. The patient can see where they need to go and how many people are currently waiting before them. This will help the doctor manage the flow of patients. This will also reduce the patient’s anxiety or feeling of being on-edge when they are waiting by letting them know exactly when it is their turn.
- The document management screen—from there, patients can upload or view their medical documents. No need to bring them in paper formats anymore.
- FAQ/chatting with a doctor—from this screen, patients can quickly search for the answer to a simple question or request a chat with their doctor, if they have forgotten to ask a specific question during their consultation.
Thanks for reading!
This article was written as part of the the UX/UI Design Bootcamp I followed in January—March 2021 at Ironhack.
