6 tips on designing for healthcare

If you are considering a product or user experience design role at a healthcare company, here are the 6 most important lessons from my own work as a product designer that might help you.

1. Learn how the industry operates

America’s healthcare system is among the most complex in the world. When I was getting started I was largely unfamiliar with common concepts and the terminology about how the industry operates. This sometimes hurt my ability to meaningfully participate in project discussions. So, I hit the ground running and researched anything I didn’t understand. If you are starting out in design within healthcare, I recommend gaining a good grasp of the following topics:

• The many (many) types of insurance plans (HMOs, PPOs, HDHP, etc.) offered by healthcare providers. I found that understanding the intricacies of how these plans vary informed my designs. For example: Identifying that some information such as deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums is common in various insurance plans will help you determine the static content.
• The typical process for patients seeking care and medical providers giving care. For example: If you are designing a user flow for getting a second opinion, you will need to know that some insurance plans require patients to see their primary care physicians before seeing a specialist directly.

2. Partner with different team members

Involve every stakeholder in the design process to hear insights from different roles in your organization. For example: Discuss your design ideas with the customer care team as they are likely the closest to your end-users. Product managers (PMs) can help you identify what has or hasn’t worked in the past by looking at product metrics. You can also partner with PMs to see how your design jives with upcoming features. I have also found success sitting in meetings with employee benefit managers to gain insight on their decision making process. On many projects you will work on, it will be difficult to build a comprehensive picture of all the touch points for the design on your own. Lean on your shared pool of knowledge to make your design as robust and effective as possible.

3. For usability testing, recruit participants from similar demographics as your target users

Understand the audience you are designing for by making user personas and mapping them to your current product users to make the most of usability testing. Usability testing is an integral part of the design process that reduces the risk of building the wrong product — it ensures that your solutions truly address the problems you are trying to solve. During usability testing, users are asked to complete certain tasks using your product or an interactive prototype. You have to be thoughtful using this research tool, especially in healthcare as user interactions can be extremely personal and emotional. Imagine someone who has never experienced back pain asked to role-play a patient with spinal distress. This disconnect can make it difficult for participants to mimic the discomfort of actual patients during testing and enact how they would typically react.

While the user personas you create and actual users might not be identical, you can use these profiles to recruit participants who are in similar demographic groups by adding filters around household income, tech savviness, general health etc. It helps if your participants have had similar healthcare interactions as your users so that they can speak from personal experience when they test your product. Design your usability testing using specific tasks that participants can perform using your product and track the success rate of each of these tasks to help consolidate your research findings.

4. Share usability testing insights

Invite members of other teams, such as product managers and engineers, to participate in your research sessions. Give everyone a chance to get close to the users they are working for. After conducting your research, package and provide your insights to the product, marketing, and engineering teams so that everyone can benefit from the shared knowledge. Include audio and visual elements in your presentation — they allow you to present the exact emotions participants felt when trying your product. This engages your stakeholders and often results in higher quality discussion around solutions.

5. Keep it simple

The appetite for innovative technological approaches to healthcare is larger than ever among doctors, patients and employers. However, it’s important to remember there is still a wide gap between the average Silicon Valley technophile and an average consumer of healthcare services and products. The majority of American healthcare users are not tech savvy so be wary of designing complex interactions. For example: Your user base may not be used to navigating smaller screens or conducting multi-step payment interactions. Boiling each interaction down to its simplest components is often key to the best design and user experience.

6. Avoid using medical jargon

If you must use medical terminology within your designs, be sure to clearly explain the concepts. A recent PolicyGenius survey discovered that only 4% of Americans were able to correctly define all four common healthcare insurance terms with confidence: deductible, copay, co-insurance, out-of-pocket maximum. Simple and clean design is pointless if users can’t understand the content. When users do not understand the information being presented to them, it places a greater burden on the customer care team and even worse, may cause users to ignore information crucial to their own health.

I entered the healthcare field as a designer with limited knowledge of it as a consumer. These lessons have consistently helped me navigate design challenges in one of the most complex industries in America. Hopefully you find them useful in your endeavors in healthcare-related design.

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