Redesigning healthcare access
From refining the idea to a development ready deliverable.
Elya’s mission is to facilitate access to healthcare through a simple and enjoyable experience, to deliver peace of mind through a constant connection between doctor and patient, and to promote a preventative approach to medicine by making it possible to consult a health professional at all times. Elya offers at-home visits and telemedicine through its app for an affordable rate that includes treatment follow-ups and all the necessary information a patient would need from a doctor.
TOOLS USED
SERVICES DELIVERED
UX DESIGN
UI DESIGN
UX RESEARCH
BRANDING
CREATIVE DIRECTION
ART DIRECTION
VISUAL DESIGN
INTERACTION DESIGN
MOTION DESIGN
DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGY
BUSINESS DESIGN
MY ROLE: Elya needed help to turn its team vision into a brand, a tangible product, and an experience from scratch. I helped to bring the team’s ideas into reality following the UX design and design thinking process alongside other methodologies like business model canvas and creative sprints: I helped to turn Elya from an idea using research, wire-framing, and prototyping to a Hi-Fi user-tested development ready deliverable.
01↓
A- RESEARCH: I conducted desk, discovery, and user research for Elya. Started with a competitive analysis of similar products, followed by a survey of around 120 people which results helped me to define a proto-persona used to start 20 discovery interviews to refine the initial idea, to validate if the product was desirable, and if all the features that the users needed were considered.
RESEARCH SUMMARY
20 Users interviewed.
Scripted Questions.
Questions around healthcare access, needs, concerns and frustrations, digital habits, and proof-of concept.
Zoom and Hangouts as communication tool used.
Following an interview guide designed for this purpose.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH GOALS
- Identify user profiles, goals and motivations, patterns, and behaviors to create a user persona for potential users.
- Gather in-depth feedback from user’s habits and problems
- Verify our hypothesis: Users stop looking for medical attention because it’s difficult to access.
- Verify if a telemedicine and at-home health care app is attractive for potential users.
- Gather information about potential users and their relationship with healthcare.
- Verify trust levels while accessing services online among app users.
- Refine and define Elya’s user persona healthcare and online consumption habits.
SECONDARY RESEARCH GOALS
- Trends benchmark
- Gather information about existing online healthcare providers.
- Identify design pros and cons for design inspiration.
- Identify the competitor’s value proposition.
- Define the final target user decisions to use this service.
HIGH LEVEL RESEARCH QUESTIONS
- How do you normally proceed to get an appointment with a doctor?
- Have you had any frustrations during the process?
- What have you done to tackle those problems on your own?
- What do you think of the healthcare access experience overall?
- What would you think of an app to get medical visits at home and telemedicine?
- Would you use it? If not what are your concerns?
- Do you know of any similar services?
USER PERSONA
Tanya
32 y/o
Mexico City
Brand Manager
Single
Tanya is a 32 y/o brand manager that works at a big company. She is so passionate about her job that it is her number one priority at the moment. To save time she always uses apps that help her to be more practical, she doesn’t have much time to cook so she orders food, makes grocery and clothing shopping online, moves to her office using an app and she appreciates all of the help she can get through her phone. She is concerned and aware of not being as healthy as she could be, so she tries to get professional health every time she notices something is out of balance with her body. She doesn’t care how expensive or complicated getting medical attention can be but wants it as soon as possible but most of the time she faces a process that is slow and complicated to get an appointment. Because of that, she often ends up googling about her condition and self-medicating or just waiting for her condition to fade unless she has any uncomfortable or scary symptoms.
INTERESTS
- Everything tech-related, she wants to own the latest technology because that helps her to have a more practical life.
- At the moment she is interested in advancing her career above all.
- She is interested in staying healthy and for that she always looks for professional health as soon as possible.
INFLUENCES
- She takes recommendations from her friends. Most of the things she buys and uses come from close friends’ recommendations.
- She follows many Instagram and TikTok accounts which she trusts and is very influenced by the people who run them.
- She has some concerning medical history in her family which makes her stressed every time she feels that something is out of balance.
OBJECTIVES
- Her main objective is to be practical. To have as much time possible to achieve her goal without losing focus.
- She wants to use technology to her advantage as much as possible.
- She wants to stay healthy and for that, she appreciates professional help.
NEEDS
- Tanya needs a solution to get medical attention in a practical way.
- She needs to use technology to her advantage but she has not found anything related to healthcare yet.
- She mostly needs medical attention that delivers peace of mind. A doctor that makes her feel like everything is going to be ok and that really takes her of her.
MOTIVATIONS
- Tanya looks for medical attention every time she feels that something in her body is out of balance.
- Owning new apps that help her save time is a great deal to her and she gets excited to have new solutions that make her life more practical and save time.
- She wants to have as much time as possible to achieve her personal goals and for that, she appreciates any help.
FRUSTRATIONS
- She struggles everytime she wants to get medical attention, delays to get an appointment are too long.
- When she gets it she feels like the doctor deliver a cold and impersonal attention without delivering enough information to give her the peace of mind she is looking for.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
To get medical attention can be complicated. Delays to get an appointment are too long and the service tends to be expensive, cold, impersonal and doesn’t deliver the necessary information for the patients to get the peace of mind they are looking from a healthcare professional.
A- RESEARCH: During interviews with patients I have discovered interesting insights that directly ended up impacting the experience and interface design as well as the business itself. This is one example of one of those findings that turned out to be very fruitful during the design process:
INSIGHT
Patients feel that doctors are not empathetic during consultations. They consider that the treatment is cold and impersonal and they think they are not receiving enough information to be able to get the peace of mind they are looking for. This makes them feel that the value-price ratio when paying a doctor is not balanced and many times they prefer to avoid the visit unless it is an emergency or a case when discomfort is unbearable.
QUOTE
“Consultations tend to be cold, short, and impersonal. You pay a lot of money to visit a doctor and to get just a few minutes of attention before being dismissed. You leave their office without really explaining what your condition is about, with a prescription full of medicines that you have no idea of how they work, where to get them and there are always further questions about the treatment in the upcoming days that you never have the chance to ask”
Mariana M. – 35
IDEA
- Doctors should be trained to provide empathic and warm attention, which should include routine follow-up messages at some point during treatment.
- Getting a doctor through Elya should be seamless and the rate reasonable to always be the first option for a patient.
- The app should provide information about the condition
- The app should allow the patient to buy medicines, follow their treatment, and contact the doctor for further questions.
- A subscription model that grants access to a number of consultations can make sense to complement the business model.
02↓
1- INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE: Using all of the insights and after the co-creational process with the Elya team I’ve built an initial version of the information architecture for the app. With that first version, I built a Card Sorting exercise which I ran with the team and with users to define which was the most logical and intuitive way to organize the information inside the app.
03↓
1- WIREFRAMING & PROTOTYPING: With the information architecture at hand, it was time to move to the drawing board, I’ve wire-framed all of the information architecture by hand to check it back with the team. After further discussion, I started to create Mid-Fi mock-ups so I could start user testing. To start I ran 6 concept proof sessions with potential users and then I built a prototype to start testing tasks.
04↓
1- USERTESTING & ITERATION: During user testing sessions with around 20 people, I got some valuable insights that helped me to move forward with Hi-Fi versions. These insights encompassed changes and improvements throughout the design that led to the final version of the product. In this example, we found that patients look for medical attention as soon as possible. They are more interested in a calendar starting “today” with a weekly view than doing it in a full calendar view.
“I would want an appointment for today or tomorow, nor for the next month or during the year”
Rebeca M. – 29
05↓
1- HIFI & DESIGN SYSTEM: After completing user testing it was time for the fun part, turning all of the designs into Hi-Fi, and from there building a design system to deliver a development-ready project.
FINAL PROTOTYPE: I used this prototype for the final round of testing asking the participants to execute different tasks:
- Register an account
- Login
- Book an at-home visit
- Book a virtual visit
- Access your doctor profile
- Send a message to your doctor
- Check your treatment
- Access your account
- Go back to the start page
THE BRAND
Building a brand for a new company must be a cocreational process. Having the client involved generates a feeling of ownership and commitment with their own brand and gets ideas flowing all over the team. My job, as in the UX process is to make sure that the best possible decisions are being taken and the best possible deliverable is being built. In this case we started with a full week of exercises for the refinement of the idea through building a business model canvas, positioning exercises and a branding workshop. The branding workshop consists in a series of exercises to help the team imagine and invision the brand that their organization needs, by defining how it will look, how it will sound and what is personality will be like. The process follows by building a moodboard to have a further discussion with the team to build the first proposals, those proposals, including naming, identity and voice tone where tested with potential patients to define the most successful path to follow and to build a brand that really resonates with its final target.
01↓
1- NAMING: elya is a female name. The idea behind it was to create a personality for the brand, one that makes you feel accompanied, a brand that listens and cares for you. After a lot of brainstorming we came with this name derived from the concept of “elysium” the Greek heaven where everyone is happy and healthy. elya is the personification of this concept, a person dedicated to care for you, to help you be happier and healthier than you already are.
02↓
2- IDENTITY: Serious, yes fresh. I started with a blue base accompanied by a colorful palette that later during interviews was not very successful. After taking potential users feedback into consideration i turned the elya into a much more sober side, but without removing the “freshness” to it by using neo-morphic textures, high contrast and a personal tone into ints messages.
DIN Next LT Pro
Talk to a doctor
wherever you are.
03↓
2- POCS: After having the basic branding elements defined. It was time to apply those principles into the necessary points of contact for the marketing strategy. Mainly the website and social media. So for that i defined the most important selling points and wrote messages that served as content for both the website and social media. This is an example of the final landing page for elya:
04↓
MARKETING MATERIALS: After all of the user testing rounds i could identify the selling points that resonated most with possible patients. I used all of our branding principles, UX findings and selected messages to create a beautiful marketing campaing that was launched in different formats through Google and Facebook first with the purpose of A/B test different pricing options and finally to get the first real users for the beta testing.
