Project Scope:
Chase Brexton (http://www.chasebrexton.org/) is a community healthcare provider located in and around Baltimore City. They are seeking a solution for keeping in touch with patients. The solution should also allow patients to check on their medical insurance and perform tasks such as scheduling doctor's appointments.
My role in the project
I created the paper prototypes and the visual design of the final tech prototypes. I also extended the project beyond the class by working on high-fidelity mockups of the screens.
The Process
Brainstorming
The topic of healthcare and health insurance is a complex one with many issues and considerations. To help us decide which aspects of healthcare we wanted to focus on, we started with a brainstorming session. Each of us wrote all our ideas and thoughts on sticky notes, each person had a different color. Next, we grouped similar concepts together. From there, we decided on the basic functionality and purpose of our app.
Information and task flow
The next step was to create an information flow diagram from the affinity diagram. This served as the basis for our task flow diagram. Along with the persona that we created, the task flow diagram was our blueprint for the prototype design.
Preparing our paper prototypes
The paper prototypes were useful for communicating ideas within the team. We used it to try out different ideas for interface design and deciding how information would be presented on the screen.
Paper prototyping
The paper prototype was shown to users who would belong to one of our target user groups (the newly insured under the Affordable Care Act) and we discovered several insights that were invaluable to our design of the tech prototype.
Note: It was difficult to access users at the extreme end of the demographic - low-literacy, older and low-income users, due to the confidential nature of healthcare so we chose to focus on users who qualified for health insurance under the new Act i.e. people who did not have full-time jobs before which were mostly in the younger demographic.
Our final design utilized both the suggestions we obtained from our prototyping as well as what we learned from the literature on lower literacy users, in terms of interface preferences. We decided to use labels such as "I'm not sure I have coverage" and "I don't know" - based on interviews with users and research, to introduce users to the service provided by Chase Brexton. Based on the feedback from users, we focused on location services (Finding Chase Brexton clinic locations) and customized information. The voice-activated feature was included from our study on lower literacy users, which suggested that voice was an alternative to entering information via the keypad.
Our research showed that lower literacy and older users preferred watching videos to reading large amounts of text so we decided to use a video to give an overview of the services at Chase Brexton.
The reasons used here came from actual patient feedback. Voice input was highlighted so that users could avoid having to type with the phone keypad.
The goal of this app was to make it easy for patients to connect with the healthcare provider. The appointment scheduler simplifies the process of making an appointment.
