Caravela
Mobile App that helps people to manage their own health records as well as their family members.
ROLE
UX Researcher and UI Designer
TIMELINE
Jan-Dec 2017
Caravela is a mobile app that aims to help small and midsize Portuguese producers in publishing and selling their brands through marketing advertising as well as assisting with the controlling and management of the stocks and orders.
The Story
This is a funny one!
One summer I decided to donate blood to help those in need, for which I went to the hospital. During my health assessment prior to my donation, the doctor asked for my blood type. I didn’t know the answer to this, so I intuitively grabbed my phone thinking that I will have that information stored somewhere. I was wrong!! In that moment, just like a lightning bolt, I decided what my project would be - Life Path.
Problem
In Portugal all patient health records are kept on paper solely for the purpose of
use by medical professionals, creating a barrier in transparency and communication between healthcare professionals and the population. Such a product does not exist in the market, where patients’ health information is gathered for easy access to use by the population.
Goals
💪🏻 Empower the general public to have the independence to access their own health records as well as their family members’ records.
🗣 Encourage direct and simplified communication between health professionals and users, raising awareness of a bidirectional system.
Solution
Design a mobile app that gathers all patient's records in a way which can be easily understood by the general public, regardless of age and background.
Process
When I started this project, I elected the Design Thinking process as my primary method as it is iterative, flexible and focused on bringing ideas to life based on how real users think, feel and behave. With this process I was able to understand the user needs, define the problem through a human-centric perspective, brainstorm different ideas, create a prototype and test the solution.
User Research
💆🏻♀️ "Try to set aside your own assumptions, and focus solely on the users and their needs."
For a more holistic understanding of this matter, I spent a lot of time buried in the academic research and literature in order to have a better understand of the problem. A book came out of it!
While I was researching, I also conducted an online survey, with a total of 140 responses from people between 18 and 50 years old, where I could understand their healthcare routine.
- Whether do they keep their own health records?
- What kind of mobile apps they use to track their records?
- What kind of devices they use to monitor their physical activity?
- Whether they feel they would use a mobile app like Life Path?
- What kind of features they would like to see in this mobile app.
I also contacted my local GP and managed to arrange a few interviews with the doctors and nurses in order to validate the product and obtain an educated perspective and insights from real health care professionals.
As we can see in the graph above, only 5% of the survey participants keep all of their own health records to hand.
Competitive Analysis
🕵🏻♀️ Let's see what is out there!
I analyzed existing solutions, their features and potential design rationals, as well as user feedback to understand what have been done and why it is effective or futile.
For that I made a heuristic evaluation to discover new opportunities, analysing six mobile apps.
- iOS Halth
- myFitnessCompanion
- Pregnancy+
- Einstein Vaccines
- Runtastic
- Portuguese NHS - MySNS
The mobile app I found that was the most relevant to Life Path, was MySNS, which is a Governmental app created with the prospect of increasing proximity between the patient and healthcare professionals, and transparency of services provided. However, it was just a basic consultation app of government health recommendations. Right there I knew I would have an opportunity to make a difference and fill the technological gap in healthcare with Life Path!
🚀 While creating Life Path my main goal was to develop it further than the existing MySNS and create a more complete and reliable product where users could be more autonomous.
Research Analysis
📝 Gathering insights using the designer's best friends - sticky notes
Following an extensive user research I moved into user research analysis where I turned the raw data into valuable insights, by creating an affinity diagram.
ORGANIZE + DEFINE + CATEGORIZE + SYNTHESIZE = CONCRETE DATA
Me creating an Affinity Diagram to find meaningful insights from my data
👫🏻 Personas - They make real users memorable
User personas are crucial to design something that is useful, desirable, and valuable to my target audience, so based on my research I recognised that there were 2 key user types for Life Path: parents and pregnant women.
Ideation Phase
💡 Generating ideas...many many ideas
I started the ideation phase with a brainstorm. This way I could generate as many ideas as possible without any restrictive fear of judgment.
Having all the ideas exposed in front of me, my next step was to create a sitemap. It helped me to melogically organize my content and navigation giving me a visual representation of the site’s organization and how different sections are linked together.
Prototype & Test
👩🏻💻 Diverging and converging ideas
I started to sketch the first ideas on paper and made low fidelity wireframes to give me a clear idea of how the user might navigate through the app. I then made tests with users, who were able to iterate rapidly and identify usability issues.
After making improvements to the wireframes and being happy with the them, it was time to create high fidelity wireframes and the prototype.
First drafts of Life Path
🤳🏻 Testing Life Path with users
I conducted usability tests with 10 users, from different backgrounds and age groups, in order to validate the product.
A script was written where participants were asked to perform a number of tasks in order to explore all the features of the prototype. I tried to make it broad enough to ensure that the participants would navigate through the main screens and main functionalities of the mobile app.
Through direct observation and thinking aloud protocol, I was able to observe how the users interacted with the prototype, in order to identify problems or issues they had with the interface and why those issues occured as well as valuate the levels of satisfaction and frustrations.
User testing Life Path
#1 - Add appointments
One of the tasks in the script was to add an appointment to the record, which caused confusion to some users.
In the first iteration we can see 2 add buttons, one on the top "add relative" and one on the right side of the screen "add appointment". Some users would click the "add relative" button instead of “add appointment.”
Solution: Based on my observations above, I decided to remove the "add relative" button from this screen and move it to the profile screen, avoiding confusion for the user.
#2 - Add pregnancy appointment
Another task asked to the users was to activate the pregnant profile when booking an appointment, by clicking on the star icon. Later on in the test, the users were asked to navigate to the calendar screen and identify the “star” icon. Only 4 users were able to identify it as a pregancy appointment.
Solution: To improve the user experience and simplify navigation of this feature, I added a toggle switch in order to activate the pregnant profile and inserted a fetus icon in order to be more intuitive for the user according to the Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design -
Recognition rather than recall.
#3 - Identify pregnant appointment
As I mentioned before, on the calendar screen, I asked users to identify the star icon. However by the time they arrived in that screen, most of them had forgotten what the star icon represented.
Solution: Once again, I swapped the start icon with the fetus one to be more intuitive to the user.
LEARNINGS
& REFLETIONS
💪🏻 Design can be a powerful tool in the healthcare field
Design can solve some of the problems arising from weak communication within the healthcare system. UX and UI design can help create a stronger and more impartial link between patients and health services / professionals.
🧏🏻♀️ Always confirm your assumptions
I started this project because I thought that a product like this could be helpful for the population. However I had to run surveys to confirm my assumptions, to make sure I was making a product with value. User demand is the most important element to evaluate before conducted a project. What I may find useful may not be useful to the market, so market research is imperative at the earliest stage possible.
CONCLUSION
I must say that I truly enjoyed conducting this project from scratch. It was such a valuable opportunity to learn so much about UX and UI design, empathize with the users, understand their needs and create a friendly mobile app.
The users were satisfied with the app as a all and confirmed that Life Path was a product that would be a wonderful asset to the general public.
NEXT PROJECT
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Caravela - Mobile App