A Design Sprint to help a Top Insurance Provider Validate Telemedicine (pre-COVID-19)
This is a story about a Design Sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.
A Design Sprint Case Study by Catalina de León Belloc, a Product Designer at Feedly, Design Sprint Facilitator, and founder of Purple Bunny, a remote-first digital innovation studio based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I’m telling this story in the midst of a global pandemic, so to many it might seem obvious that telemedicine is the way to go, now that healthcare providers have never been so forced to adopt new technologies.
🤔 The Challenge
In November 2019, a couple of months before the pandemic hit, the healthcare industry was stuck in the past. In Argentina, the medical sector hasn’t seen many recent advances in the digital space.
OSDE is one of Argentina’s top 3 health insurance providers, working for over 45 years to bring a unique healthcare service to more than 2 million customers. During 2019 the company saw the urgency of going through a digital transformation to be able to offer a better service to both their customers and doctors. They were interested in organizing and monetizing some of the informal communications that happen between patients and doctors.
The OSDE team had ideas for multiple tools that they wanted to translate into digital products. For this particular project, they wanted to improve doctor-patient relationships through an app that doctors could use daily for managing patients more efficiently.
OSDE wasn’t sure if doctors would adopt this digital platform as part of their everyday work.
This was a perfect challenge for a Design Sprint. Litebox and Indicius, two local creative agencies, had been working with OSDE since early 2019. They approached Purple Bunny to join forces and create an all-star Design Sprint team to help OSDE find solutions and test high-fidelity telemedicine prototypes with real users.
In a single week, we used the Design Sprint process to help them create a mass of possible solutions, rapidly prototype high-fidelity designs of the app, and validate the solution with real users — doctors in their network.
👥 The Team
This was one of our largest sprint teams so far, with 10 people participating in the workshop, including a doctor.
The Client Team
- Product Manager
- Product Owner
- Chief of Medical Emergencies
- Chief of Contracts
- Scrum Master
- Business Analyst
The Facilitation Team
- I was the facilitator
- Valentin Rios, lead designer at Purple Bunny
- Macarena Gonzalez Cazon, designer at Indicius
- Agostina Albamonte, project manager at Purple Bunny
The Process
We set up a 2-week process around the Design Sprint. The first week, what we call “Week 0” was for research and preparation, so that during Week 1 we could hit the ground running with the Design Sprint.
🔬 Week 0: Research & Preparation
We spent the week studying OSDE’s current product and having individual conversations with each team member. This allowed us not only to have a better understanding of the challenge at hand but also to define the expectations of the project.
🎯 Week 1: The Sprint
Through the structured activities of Day 1 of the Design Sprint, we aligned on a common challenge. These are the Sprint Questions and 2-year goal that we defined:
The second day of the workshop culminated in a storyboard of a landing page which explained the app’s 4 main features in detail:
- Appointment scheduling
- Medical history
- Video appointments
- Digital prescriptions
We chose to focus on these 4 tools because we knew that these were the places where we’d find the most resistance from doctors. The beauty of the Design Sprint is being able to validate risky solutions at a low cost. So the more challenging the solution we chose to tackle, the better the results would be.
It was equally important to focus on the visual elements and the copy so that the users could understand exactly what each of these new tools was all about.
After 2 long days of workshops, we were ready to start designing the solution and recruiting users to test it out.
On Day 3, our designers created a high-fidelity landing page with screenshots demonstrating how each feature worked. Check out the magic:👇
User Testing
The moment of truth arrived on Day 4 — user testing. We were ready to test our simple, clear, and attractive design.
Recruiting users wasn’t easy at all — doctors are busy, especially the week before Christmas. We managed to find 5 doctors in different disciplines to participate in remote interviews from their offices.
We used the Rainbow Spreadsheet, a lean UX research method, to take notes during the user tests and find the most important feedback from users.
We couldn’t wait to get it all into a report to share with OSDE.
We assumed that doctors don’t want to offer video appointments, and the user tests demonstrated that they want to start trying them.
Jorge Marino
Product Manager and Decider
The user test results showed the exact opposite of our pre-Sprint assumptions. Doctors were not only willing to adopt new technology to improve their patient care, but some had actually been pushing for them. That’s why we love this methodology — it demolishes any preconceived notions.
💡The result: A clear vision of how to implement telemedicine
We translated all of the results of the Sprint and user testing to a report so that the OSDE team could continue to follow our recommendations and next steps.
This process helped the OSDE team clarify their vision and orient themselves around the real needs of their doctors. They’re just getting started, they have a long way to go to integrate telemedicine into their healthcare system. But knowing they’re going in the right direction — after a single week of high-fidelity prototyping — is the most efficient and productive way to kick off this product.
We saw incredibly valuable results in a single week. Now we have tons of information to start implementing, and we already want to do another Design Sprint.
Fernando D’Ambrosio
Product Owner
Right now, video appointments and digital prescriptions are critical for enforcing social distancing and not saturating medical centers, urgent-care facilities, and hospitals. We love that we were able to participate in a project like this that has immediate, visible benefits for the community, and we hope that OSDE is able to implement their solutions soon.
🍎 What we learned
After every Sprint we run we do a retrospective to explore how we can improve our process. Here are some of the things we learned:
Limit the number of Sprinters
We had people in the room that were not part of the sprint team but were there only to observe. However, this ended being a bit disruptive to the process as it generated distractions. We decided that from now on we will only have sprinters in the room. If it’s absolutely necessary to have an observer we should set up clear rules and expectations of their role beforehand.
If you’re doing remote user testing, prepare users ahead of time
We had a lot of technical problems with the remote user tests with Doctors that were not tech-savvy. Next time, we’ll do an orientation session prior to the test to get them familiarized with the tools.
Create a highlight video of user tests as an extra deliverable
The whole goal of the sprint was for this OSDE team to pitch the idea to stakeholders in order to get their approval to build these tools. It would have been helpful to create a short video with the best parts of the user tests so they could share the video with stakeholders to show the results of the sprint, along with our report. We did this in later Sprints and the clients loved it!
Read more (and see snapshots of our process) on the case study on our website.
🙏 Thanks to Annie Bacher and Agostina Albamonte for helping me tell this story
