Patient Booking App

Digitizing patient booking

Research, UX, UI

The purpose of this project was to place people at the centre of healthcare by understanding the patient experience more deeply. I chose to focus on family doctors because they are often the gateway to more specialized care. My goal was to make it easier for patients to access the full benefits of the patient-provider relationship.

quick facts

Roughly 90% of Ontarians have a primary health care provider (2017)

The majority of Canadians with a regular family physician reported excellent quality of care

Canadians who don’t see or talk to a health professional regularly are less likely to engage in preventative health measures

Current state

Two major insights from user interviews guided the project. They represent an opportunity to make booking practices more congruent with the growing use of technology in our every-day lives.

It can be difficult to find an appointment time that fits both the patient's and doctor's schedule

The current behaviour is to call in to the doctor’s office to book an appointment, sometimes with no answer. When you do get an answer, matching the patient's schedule to the doctor's is frustrating.

It is often left up to the patient to remember important routine appointments

Since family doctors are the gateway for other appointments like preventive cancer screenings, the current state can make patients feel disconnected from the process of managing their health.

who i designed for

Choosing navigation

After authoring a set of user stories based on the persona's goals and motivations, I had a structure for what a solution could look like and started sketching.

For the navigation, I considered how two different styles might work. First, a tab bar would mean using only two tabs since the user stories represented two main functions, appointments and profile. This wouldn't adhere to Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which recommends using three to five tabs for iPhone to help the interface feel connected.

My second idea was to use segmented control to switch between appointment views. This concept was a better fit for HIG and had the added benefit of freeing up screen space, which became an important consideration further on.

sketching ideas for structure & navigation

Screen real estate

After translating the sketches into wireframes, I tested the usability of the prototype. Users were able to complete the tasks with ease but as I observed how they used the prototype, I saw room for improvement. Having three stacked, static sections on the calendar screen meant users needed to scroll to the bottom to see appointment options. This leaves the calendar out of sight by the time the user can see the appointment options if they have a busy day scheduled.

I searched for inspiration to see how I could make better use of the screen space and found this post by Cuberto demonstrating movable cards. I started noticing this pattern more and more and incorporated it into the prototype. This solution would give users the flexibility to decide what they see on the screen. My next step would be to make a more advanced prototype and test if the idea works in the context of this solution.

switching to movable cards for more flexibility

The result

The latest iteration is a solution that makes it easier for patients to find appointments that work with their schedule. Patient and doctor schedules would be synched to the app and generate appointment options based on shared availability. This would help patients stay on top of preventive appointments and feel more connected with the process of managing their health.

Learnings

Fail fast

I'd heard about failing fast and the one dollar prototype before, but this project really illustrated the efficacy of those concepts. Trying out ideas with sketching was a fast way to see which ones could work. Using a low-fidelity prototype was especially helpful to see where the user flow might break.

Function defines structure

It was helpful to use the epics I created from user stories to understand the structure of the concept. I learned to look at the big picture before diving in to just one epic and found that defining the function determined the navigation and overall structure of the prototype.