UX Case Study — App for Booking Doctors

I hate going to the doctor, who doesn’t? Many aspect of it is tiresome: booking an appointment seems like a nightmare. Trying to squeeze the next available slot in a busy calendar is frustrating. Overall cost of the examination may not be clear ahead, paying with credit card may not be ensured. Worry and anxiety may fill the steps of the process: how severe is the issue if there’s one? How results are to be published, should there be a follow up visit? Such ‘headaches’ could be treated if you have a steady doctor, but once in a while you have to visit a specialist whom you might not knew before and the general feeling of unease can increase even higher.

I was just done with a standard medical check, when I had to choose a product or a service for my UX assignment at school. After having a fresh personal exposure to the healthcare system, I thought it would be exciting to analyse an experience that people want to get over with or naturally avoid.

The Brief and the Process

Even though the brief subject-wise was quite broad, the list of deliverables were quite specific: define problem statements, draft hypothesis, validate those and get insights by conducting user interviews. Summarise the takeaways in spot on personas, user journeys and continue with either user stories or jobs to be done. Then set a well-working IA that encompasses the advised solutions the journeys revealed, finally draw wireframes and run a sense check on the structure via usability tests. In this case study I’ll describe the milestones of this process, explain key considerations I was following and showcase elements of the high fidelity prototype I designed.

Ways of Working

At KREA Contemporary Art School in Hungary the UX curricula is set in a way to practice the tools and methodology gradually, i.e. in class we jointly reviewed the principles and analysed practical examples, participated in field studies, conducted interviews and visited meet-ups. After gradually uncovering the end-to-end process this way, we worked separately on our own individual projects per semester, with the objective to achieve a wide and diverse portfolio of projects and practise. Back at this stage in the program, we were focusing on building empathy and creating IA.

Scoping and initial assumptions

After deciding the high level subject, a closer scope definition was required. Some part of the full experience has to do more with service design, which I wanted to deliberately exclude to avoid dealing with complex issues regarding the much debated quality of the universal healthcare system in the country.

Considering feasibility as per the given timeframes, I decided to focus on an app design for appointment booking. My initial assumption was that digital solutions for booking doctor’s appointment in Hungary is not widespread as patients rather opt for getting an appointment over the phone, or they pretty much adapt to the next available opportunity they receive in the universal healthcare system. My fundamental hypothesis was that digital options are more likely to be used in private clinics. Following this logic I specified a set of broader assumptions as follows:

The User Interviews

After highlighting these key areas that required validation I created an interview guide. Within the framework of the assignment the suggested user interview count was set to 3 in order to aid and ease our work (while still bearing in mind that 5 interviews could conclude optimal insights). When organising the interviews I set a cautious filter on having both males and females with different geographical background. (This latter approach derives from the logic of the healthcare system: eligibility to visit public general practitioners is district and residency based).

After analysing the interviews I consolidated the insights and developed a persona, in which I have captured the user’s key goal and frustrations that my design should ultimately tackle.

User Journey

The main takeaway from the interviews was that there is a mixed approach when considering healthcare options. There seem to be a solid reliance on general practitioners by seasonal diseases (cold, cough, flu), but for some areas (like dentists as highlighted in the hypothesis list) private clinics are definitely preferred. There were good examples of online booking solutions mentioned in both sectors, but patients would not widely demand the digital options: discussing appointment over the phone to get into the office of a trusted doctor and adapting to the specialists’ available slots seems an accepted trade-off. In the journey therefore under current options various interaction channels (even offline ones) have been considered. Under the advised app features I was then focusing on how that specific step of the whole experience can be supported with the product.

Additional finding was that when deliberating the price of the service patients validate the value they get in return for their money: they check ratings, doctor profiles, pictures showcasing the office design and hygiene. From payment options cash or credit card remains key, this however partially disproved an initial assumption, that listing other cost coverage options like health insurance allowances would count.

Ultimately the app can show its strength when

• patients want to browse wide selection of available appointments of doctors they know and want to re-book,
• new doctors and clinics need to be identified in a trusted and easy way,
• users maintain appointments and reminders in an online calendar and keep track of their daily routines using their mobile.

Creating an IA

Before continuing with the setup of the IA, in order to give a valid proposition for the app features, I ran a competition analysis to understand functionalities as well as general patterns similar applications or websites offer. For this I’ve been checking both foreign (like Zocdoc) and Hungarian products (as Foglaljorvost). IA and wireframe sketches were done simultaneously.

Prototype and Usability Test

I created high fidelity wireframes, all together 20 screens for the usability test. Below are some samples. I conducted the test in Hungarian so for the sake of keeping this report intact and valid I am keeping the Hungarian version of the screens too. In English the text and labelling might how gotten different feedback on the test.

The test subject was Tamás, who as Project Manager by a global company was a perfect fit to my persona. Out of the 11 subtask 9 passed the test, for the remaining 2 failed ones I categorised the criticality of the issue, noted the exact details and added some mitigating actions. The follow up on this would require of course new iterations, but at this stage the project achieved its original objectives.

Takeaways

This work has proven to be an exciting one not just for general practice, but for exploring what works for me (until which point it was a good fit for me to stick with drawings, paper prototypes and when the concept was steady enough start digital sketching). Another takeaway was the importance of keeping focus: identify the appropriate scope (which online vs offline experience should be referred), and to keep an eye on primary objectives set per the persona and the journey throughout the whole design process.

The project work was done at Krea Contemporary Art School in Budapest, Hungary during January-February in 2018. Consulting teacher: Ádám Németh.