Springboard UI/UX Design Bootcamp
End-to-end product design - user research, art direction, wireframes, high fidelity mockups, prototyping, microanimations, and usability testing.
Être is a service that reduces anxiety and time loss in finding health care services by streamlining the process into a flow that takes mere minutes to navigate. Further, Être includes ways to encourage repeat visits with care providers so that the users can meet their personal health needs.
Finding and maintaining good health care services can be daunting and confusing for “new” adults or starting to look after their health after a period of neglect due to time, cost, and anxiety. Our design looked for how we could simplify the overall process with these factors in mind.
Healthcare is a notoriously confusing and convoluted sector, replete with gatekeeping and confusing language designed to discourage people from asking questions. Anecdotes are freely shared about the difficulty of finding good healthcare, from the institutional hurdles to the personal preoccupations. These stories are simply unacceptable, as healthcare is a basic human right and should be accessed with extreme ease. This led me to the guiding questions behind this project: in what ways can we simplify healthcare to encourage people to either a) see a doctor for the first time or b) continue to see a doctor regularly? It ultimately comes down to finding major hurdles in accessing healthcare and designing a way to either eliminate or significantly reduce their impact. Through my research, there were three key hurdles that could be addressed by the product: time, cost, and anxiety.
In a survey performed in the United Kingdom, respondents were more likely to choose either the closest doctor or one with better hours over one with the most recommendations. When asked why, they said that the time associated with getting to the doctor was more valuable to them than anything else. This sentiment was also present in my interviewees, as they stated their primary detractors in seeking care had to do with the amount of time it takes to reach care. The time elements extended further, with the amount of time spent waiting for care at the clinic and the amount of time it takes to make an appointment in the first place also being major detractors.
With the current state of healthcare in the United States, cost and knowledge surrounding health insurance is a major hurdle for people. In a recent survey, one in four people (27.2%) delayed or didn't seek out care due to confusion with health insurance. Further, another study found that 56% of those surveyed admitted to feeling "completely lost when it comes to understanding health insurance." As for my interviewees, they tended to agree with those sentiments as most of the respondents didn’t wish to seek care because of the unknown cost of care, the cost of insurance, and what is or isn’t covered by insurance.
While the previous two hurdles were relatively concrete, anxiety is a tough one to nail down to a singular pain point. On one end of the spectrum are members of the LGBT+ community: according to Human Rights Watch, 8% of people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and 29% of transgender people have reported not to have received care from a provider in 2017 because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. On the other end, we found my interviewees who stated they worried about receiving bad news, not knowing how to interact appropriately with their care provider at first interaction, or not being heard by their provider. Regardless of how you look at it, anxiety presents itself in many forms and is a significant hurdle for most people.
To address these 3 hurdles, I wanted to create a mobile application to help our users achieve their health care goals regarding booking and return visits. I decided against a web-based application as, in 2021, most interactions for my target user base take place on mobile devices rather than desktop computers. Further, I wanted to cast as wide of a net as possible for our user base. In order to address as many of the 3 hurdles as possible, the decision was made to create an application that could act as your home for healthcare: finding doctors, booking appointments, reading doctors’ notes.
In order to better understand the healthcare booking landscape, I analyzed three of the largest competitors in this realm: Zocdoc, Carbon Health, and HealthGrades.
These three services all provide the same base-level information: doctors in your area who are accepting new patients. However, their execution fails to properly address the three pain points of time, cost, and anxiety. Healthgrades offers zero answers to our pain points by simply being a list of doctors in your area; there is no booking option nor is it terribly easy to find out more about the doctor you are interested in. Zocdoc improves on this by providing an in-app booking solution, but not all doctors offer this feature. Further, their overall design is bloated and filled with repetitive and conflicting information. Carbon Health provides the best solution of the three by providing a quick and easy booking solution along with a very inviting UI, but they only offer information on their clinics which significantly limits the user's freedom and options.
With our three primary pain points in mind, we set forward on our designs for Être with the guiding principles of maternal care and professional promptness, letting users hand off the hard work of making appointments to someone who has their best interests at heart.
Having the foundation of our designs rooted in addressing one of our primary pain points (anxiety) allows our designs to constantly address it without it seeming overbearing or overly explicit. Further, it allows the specific experience flows to focus more on addressing one of our other pain points rather than attempting to juggle all three at the same time.
Brand colors
Compassionate, Caring, Understanding, Thoughtful
Être’s personality is a combination of maternal care and professional promptness, letting users hand off the hard work of making appointments to someone who has their best interests at heart.
Now that we’ve discovered our three primary pain points, we need to decide how to properly address them as thoroughly as possible. This begins with instituting an overall aesthetic and identity that will complement the in-app experience in order to make the user as comfortable as possible. For Être, this begins with our personality and brand colors that help to address some initial anxieties that were found in our user interviews.
The primary interaction designed to address both the time and anxiety pain points was finding a care provider that worked for the user. For this I wanted to provide a straightforward and quick solution that provides the right amount of options and discoverability in the flow. While giving the user as many options as possible is not an inherently harmful concept, it is essential to reduce anxiety in our users. Having a plethora of options can be pretty stressful for a user, so it was essential to mitigate superfluous possibilities that weren’t necessary.
That being said, I found it important to include a few new aspects to booking an appointment in order to ease our pain points. To help ease anxiety, we added a new option when finding care called Informational Meeting as well as a Pre-Visit Survey. In order to address time loss, we added an ASAP Search option to expedite the search process.
What About Cost?
While designing, I came to the decision to focus on the two most important pain points that my users expressed during their interviews, anxiety and time, and refine solutions around those two points in order to make the best product possible. Unfortunately, this meant that I couldn't address cost in this version of the product. For future iterations of Être, I view a solution to this as offering a cost comparison tool for our users as well as the ability to view how far the user is from their deductible or max out-of-pocket costs.
With informational meetings, the user is empowered to book a simple face-to-face meeting with a potential doctor to see if they would be a good fit together. The reason behind including this was to reduce any friction and anxieties that may exist when a user meets with a doctor for the first time by allowing them to meet without the stress of getting a physical.
To further ease anxiety, we have the Pre-Visit Survey which is designed to alleviate the stress of users not knowing which questions to ask and how to broach a subject in a proper manner. Instead of the user not knowing when to bring it up, they have the ability to include any questions or concerns before the appointment so that their doctor is aware.
On the opposite side of the same coin, we have ASAP search which allows a user to book an appointment with a doctor in as few clicks as possible. The user still has the ability to choose their doctor and general time, but it reduces the time waste that can occur when booking with a care provider.
With our first version of Être, we wanted our users to not worry about making sure they get the best care possible and, instead, empower them to live their best lives and be the best versions of themselves. In testing, we found that we were well on our way in achieving that goal.
In general, Être was “easy and simple to use” and that it wasn’t hard to “understand what each part does and where you need to find things”
The styling was “friendly and inviting” but while not coming across as too professional or playful
They appreciated having your doctors and appointments on the home screen so they wouldn’t have to go digging through the app to find the most important information
Être made finding a new doctor much easier and, if it were available today, they would be much more likely to seek out a doctor using the app than not.
Following the design phase, I conducted usability testing on our primary user flows including making an appointment, viewing doctors' profiles, and more. These tests were performed to see wether users could understand these different flows in a relatively intuitive manner.
Overall, the results were good; all of the users could navigate the basic “Get Care” flow with ease, not mentioning or displaying any particular issues. In particular, the test subjects pointed out:
Rather than pre-assigning a doctor and time to a user when they select Urgent Care, I gave them the familiar map view from the “Get Care” flow along with a list view that has the next available times listed right below the doctor’s listing. That way, the user can see the times available and have greater autonomy in selecting who they want to see while still reducing the time taken while booking this urgent care visit. If you choose a doctor from the map view, you are presented with one final time selection screen before the booking is made.
Outside of the Urgent Care flow issues, some subjects found doctor’s profiles and previous appointments troublesome. I presumed this may have been due to the lack of a robust onboarding tour describing the different core elements of the product. Upon implementing this onboarding tour and the new Urgent Care flow, I performed another round of usability tests and found that the problem was fixed.
The biggest problem, however, was in regards to the Urgent Care flow. My initial design for the Urgent Care flow, which is identical to searching for an appointment ASAP, was to present the user with a result right away so they could book an appointment in as few taps as possible. Several of the subjects were confused by the presentation of the single doctor and appointment time. They wondered whether this was based on proximity, time, or previous visits with a doctor. Further, all subjects attempted to view more doctors and times as they wanted to be aware of their options. To address these problems, I went back to the Urgent flow and applied a solution that wasn’t too dissimilar to our usual “Get Care” flow.
Finding a solution to simplify searching for a doctor is not a small task, but Être shows that it is possible and worthwhile to make the attempt. But with the initial iteration finished, where do we go from here?
When we began working on this project, we started with a seemingly simple question: in what ways can we simplify access to health care to encourage people to see a doctor? This was refined down to easing concerns around time, cost, and anxiety with health care. In Être's current iteration, we were able to successfully address time and anxiety by providing a product that allows our users to easily find a doctor and book an appointment within seconds. Further, we encourage repeat usage by reducing bloat and only providing relevant information.
During the testing phase, I asked our users a question: if you were using Être today, would you be more likely to seek out medical care on a regular basis? Every respondent agreed, with some going so far as to say they would be more likely to learn more about their insurance plan in order to maximize every opportunity of care that was at their disposal. This was when I felt we had accomplished our initial goal; with people seeking care less and less, anything that can encourage people to seek out basic medical care is a win.
From that user's response, I began to think towards what the future of Être would look like. In my opinion, it would be a response to cost concerns, insurance education, and Telehealth.
As I mentioned earlier, I decided to focus on the two primary pain points (time and anxiety) in the first version of Être in order to focus on the best possible solutions rather than stretching the app too thin by focusing on too many topics. In Être 2.0, there will be a cost comparison tool that allows our users to see the average cost of care in their area for their particular criteria. This will allow the user to search for the best combination of both quality of care and cost in order to maximize their dollar. Further, it will hold care providers accountable to consistent pricing and, hopefully, reduce any discrimination on our users' wallets.
Somewhat related to easing concerns around cost in increasing knowledge in insurance. As mentioned in the research phase, a majority of people are completely confused by health insurance. While Être does only show doctors that are in your insurance network and provides an area in settings that allows you to include your deductible and maximum out-of-pocket costs, version 2.0 would include more information about your plan. This includes programs that may help reduce your medical bills, informing you of how many specialty visits are covered, and an explanation of what your plan is and how well you are covered. Of course, this would be a major undertaking, but spreading knowledge of how health insurance works will only increase the number of people who seek medical services on a regular basis.
While Être's primary purpose will remain pairing patients with doctors that understand them, a "stretch goal" for a future version of Être is implementing a Telehealth service. Unlike others on the market today, Être's Telehealth service is more of a legitimization of the current unofficial Telehealth visits that occur over FaceTime, Zoom, or plain-old telephones by bringing a video call service into the app. This is designed more for quick questions a user may have for their doctor that doesn't warrant a full office visit. The idea behind this is to encourage people to ask as many questions as possible so there is little doubt about their health and no undue anxiety from misdiagnosing oneself on WebMD.
In the end, I am immensely proud of what Être has become; our app is one that solves real-world problems of accessing health care that other services ignore. Instead of continuing the gatekeeping of yesterday, Être opens them wide open and helps increase the number of people seeking regular medical care in a maternal, yet professional, manner.
Additional Information
Many thanks to all who helped on this project including my interviewees and test subjects.
All the thanks in the world to Sydnie Tom for all of her assistance, time, and patience. None of this would've been possible without your help.
© 2022 Charlie Beck
