Introducing The Pod
At Push Doctor, we believe that to build great products, we need to put the patient at the heart of our decision-making. This means we need to always keep channels of communication open between us and our patients.
We had lots of new and exciting ideas of how we can improve the healthcare experience in the UK, but we were not regularly gathering feedback from our patients to put those ideas to the test. That’s why in October 2018, we opened our usability lab, The Pod, at our HQ in central Manchester.
🔬 Testing the set-up
We started by testing one of our ideas internally, making sure that the space we had allocated, and the recording equipment we had acquired, all worked as we hoped. The session was a success, with little in the way of hiccups, so we decided to book our first three sessions with patients the following month.
☝️ The first session
The design team had been exploring updates to the onboarding journey, both in-app and on the web, and this felt like the best project to test first. The team created a simple InVision prototype of the new desktop journey with a new flow, layout and colourful UI. The focus for the session was to test the messaging, form length and overall experience to see if our ideas were hitting the right notes.
The sessions were going well but we quickly noticed that our tool-tips were not being noticed by any of the patients, and as such, patients were missing important information that could affect their consultation with a doctor.
The feedback from patients was that they thought the design looked like a pop-up advertisement, so of course they ignored it. With this in mind, the design team created a new tooltip design — making them more prominent so that they could be less readily dismissed as pop-ups. By the end of the day we had an all-new prototype to test in the next session.
✌️ The second session
When we looked at our existing patient data in more detail, we noticed that the majority of our returning users suffer with long term health conditions. They tended to use the service once or twice a month for prescriptions and a doctor’s advice. We wanted to speak to these patients to understand what their needs and frustrations were, and to see how we could alleviate them.
We conducted one-to-one interviews with six patients with a variety of health conditions like eczema, asthma and mental health problems. These interviews were incredibly insightful, helping us to paint a more accurate picture of the daily concerns of a patient with a long term health condition. We highlighted several areas where we could assist patients with more preventative healthcare measures ranging from nutrition plans, simple exercises, lifestyle changes and even products that can alleviate symptoms altogether (for instance, an anti-allergen pillow to help with asthma symptoms).
This session formed part of a long term project to progress Push Doctor from being a reactive healthcare service to a fully realised preventative health and wellbeing platform.
🤘 The third session
In this session we decided to revisit our onboarding prototype. The design team had made several changes based on feedback from the first session, and wanted to learn more about reactions to our designed UI elements, as this wasn’t a focus in the first session.
We ran these sessions differently, showing each patient the onboarding flow that was already live, before then showing them the prototype to compare the two. Our findings were surprising at first, the first two patients preferred the UI of the original flow saying they felt it was more clear and concise, which we certainly weren’t expecting. We were starting to worry that our new UI update was not what patients expected from the service.
The following four patients preferred the new UI so, based on the feedback, we decided to incorporate elements from the live onboarding flow into the new UI to hopefully create a well-rounded design overall, capitalising on the strengths from both the new and existing designs.
This project is now in development and will be released later this year!
🚂 Away time
As Push Doctor is an online service, our patients aren’t in just one area within the UK. That means that The Pod has to go on the road to get feedback directly from our patients around the country.
We have done sessions in London, York, Hull and Wokingham gathering feedback from both our corporate and NHS patients in separate sessions. These sessions provided invaluable insights into how different patients use the service and what their specific requirements are. We will continue to run sessions like this in the future.
Still to come
Going forward, the plan is to continue to run at least two sessions in The Pod per month, making improvements to our research space as we go.
The insights we have gained so far have been excellent and we are already making changes to our product roadmap to reflect and accommodate them. There is still lots to do and achieve, but we are really pleased with the progress we have made over such a short time. The Pod is here to stay.
We plan to run sessions like these on a regular basis so we can continually learn more from patients. If you would like to be considered for inclusion in these sessions, please get in touch by emailing thepod@pushdr.com
Ellen,
The Design Team
