Why your health app should not be “designed by doctors”

For the most part, people trust doctors. After all, who knows more about human health?

“Designed by doctors” looks great on your splash page, and it’s essential to have medical professionals advise on the development of a health app. But I’m here to tell you that your app should not be designed by them. It should be designed by designers.

The Medical System Is Broken (and always has been)

To a person, every doctor I’ve ever met has been well intentioned. You don’t spend a decade in school and then your late 20s doing 36-hour shifts at a hospital if you don’t actually care about helping people.

But good intentions alone don’t lead to good results.

Our medical system is built on broken ideas:

• You go to the doctor when you feel sick.
• The doctor tells you what to do, and you do it.
• Then, you get better.

In actuality:

• We should be taking care of our health before we get sick.
• People rarely follow doctors’ instructions.
• Especially as we age, most conditions are chronic.

Our system is not designed to handle actual challenges of human health. It ignores the realities of how our society is built and the realities of human behavior.

The results: today, we are sicker than ever before.

Digitizing Bad Ideas

Most doctors have never worked outside of this broken system.

I’ve worked with many doctors of various disciplines and specialities in my career as an applied game designer. Let me stress again, they are all excellent people.

But they are used to a top-down approach to health. The patient knows nothing: they only have problems. The doctor knows everything, and if it can be properly explained to the patient, the problems will stop.

The patient may or may not follow doctors orders. If they fail to follow doctors orders, it is their fault.

This way of thinking has been built into many digital therapeutics, “designed by doctors.” An avalanche of information and advice comes at the patient. Information and advice alone has never cured illness in the past, but since it came out of their smart phone, we expect them to follow it? Or because it’s been “gamified’ with points or achievements we expect them to be motivated?

It’s madness.

The problem was never delivering information. People generally know what is good for their health, but fail to do it. The vast majority of patients stop adhering to their prescribed treatments after a week.

Try This: “Designed By Designers”

The real problem is behavioral. Why do people do what they do? What causes them to adhere to a treatment, or not?

Doctors are clueless about this.

Behavioral Designers understand it.

Medical knowledge is about 10% of the recipe for success. The other 90% comes from UX research, UX design, and Behavioral Design (and sometimes gamification).

We expect our treatments to be evidence-based.

The fact is, there is loads of actual scientific evidence about how to get people to take action. The best medicine is evidence-based. App design should also be evidence-based.

What does this mean? Before anything is prototyped, there should be a strong theory of change grounded in behavioral science. The user must be understood well (which requires user research) Then, concepts should be validated through user testing. This is all before a prototype goes live.

Instead, too often what gets pushed to the user is based on the best guesses of non-designers.

Final thoughts: on expertise

A doctor knows what a patient needs to do. A designer can understand how to make it easy to do.

A doctor knows the root cause of a disease. A designer knows the root cause of human action.

A doctor can tell you what a patient needs to know. A designer can tell you how to make a user understand it.

When it’s time to design an intervention, let the designer take the lead. Doctors aren’t used to sitting in the back seat and letting others do the driving, but no medicine can heal if the patient won’t take it.

In the end, it’s still absolutely essential to have doctors on your team. After all, the therapy does need to work, and only doctors really understand this piece of the equation. They’re the unquestioned experts.

But when it comes to design, the unquestioned experts are designers. Let them do their jobs.

The next time you see an app “designed by doctors” take another look. Is it repeating the same mistakes that our broken medical system is already making? Is it substituting uninspired “gamification” techniques for evidence-based behavioral science? Is it overloading patients with information instead of understanding their problems?

If so, better call a designer.

Sam Liberty is an applied game designer and gamification consultant. He teaches game design at Northeastern University. He is the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health.