UEGroup + xCenter

Assisting adult caregivers with managing telemedical and personal wellness data using a cross-channel experience.

ROLE

TIMELINE

TEAM

SKILLS

TOOLS

UX/UI Designer

January 2022 through May 2022

9 UX/UI Designers

Cross-Channel Design

Figma

1 Company Sponsor

User Research

Miro

Prototyping

Visual Design

Key Contributions

I led various meetings with the company sponsor and project management. I assisted in leading an ideation and co-design workshop. In addition to conducting interviews and secondary research, I also created low and hi-fidelity prototyping.

THE CHALLENGE

Due to the current fragmented home health experience, adult caregivers need an effective cross-channel experience that assists them with managing their elderly loved ones’ telemedical and personal wellness data.

With my team, I ideated on how various types of data available could be combined to create unique insights, and develop a system that integrates this data into a unified platform that can be accessed through multiple devices.

Goal

To provide adult caregivers with a seamless experience that integrates both personal wellness and medical data into one single platform.

“As a caregiver, calling a hospital is a total nightmare - getting connected with the right department, lengthy phone calls, limited accessibility, etc. make it very hard for me.”

- Interview Participant

THE DISCOVERY

Exploring the lived experience of adult caregivers within the telehealth space

The discovery phase was a high-intensity effort that allowed the team to define project milestones and understand the company’s vision. We began our research into user needs, emotions, stories, and perspectives surrounding their caregiving experiences and their interactions with telehealth. This research was especially useful to answer some of our questions: What do caregivers do in their daily jobs? What do they need to have control of?

  • Being a caregiver is accompanied by high levels of unpredictability and creates physical and mental strain over periods of time.
  • Existing patient portal apps fall short in meeting caregivers' needs for efficient prescription refills, appointment booking, and accessing medical results.
  • Caregivers face the ongoing challenge of balancing their personal time and caregiving responsibilities, always prioritizing the patient's needs over their own.

After identifying the struggles and needs of our interviewees, our team created a persona to effectively portray our user group we were designing for.

Creating a persona led our team to take a deeper dive into the most important items in our problem space that should be researched and prioritized. As a team we needed to identify the least and most important aspects of our problem space.

Landscape Alignment

I analyzed the current artifacts, people, and issues within the telemedical field. With the help of my team, I prioritized which items were high in time consumption and high in value for us to complete within the given timeline.

Screenshot from Landscape Alignment Miro frame

💡 Takeaways

  • Consider caregiver's feelings + mental health (high in value, high in time)
  • Research current Telehealth devices (high in value, low in time)
  • Make caregiving more time efficient (medium in value, medium in time)
  • Research customization options for design (medium in value, medium in time)

Competitive Analysis

We conducted a competitive analysis to identify widely-used features that coincided with the items we identified from our interviews and landscape alignment. I performed cognitive walkthroughs of several existing mobile applications designed for caregivers. To empower a positive experience for caregivers, I concluded our solution needed the following features:

📅 Calendar

A way to see any task for the day such as taking medicine or scheduling an appointment.

💡 Reminders

Notifications for daily tasks or to-do lists.

🌎 Community

To allow for caregivers to share resources between each other.

💊 Prioritizing Medication

Caregivers and patients need to locate information on the medicine they are taking.

📲 Sharing Options

Option to update others that care for the same patient. Minimizes the chance for repeated tasks being done.

📄 Medical Information

Access to medical information from the patient's healthcare provider.

THE DEVELOPMENT

Taking the research takeaways and visualizing them through sketching and prototyping

Using the key takeaways, I created lo-fidelity screens for the "Calendar" and "Medical Information" pages through a rapid sketching activity.

Calendar Screen
Medical Information Screen

During our group sketching activity, we found that some caregivers might prioritize some features more than others based on their specific needs. This insight posted the question: How might we accommodate the priorities of various caregivers?

Unlocking User Freedom

To answer this question, the team created a questionnaire during the onboarding process that gathers insights into the user's specific needs. This gives the user control over the features they want to prioritize more than others. To map out the flow, we created a user journey.

User Journey of the Onboarding Process
In order to test the journey we created, we moved into prototyping.

IDEA EXPLORATION

Transforming our low-fidelity prototypes into mid-fidelity prototypes

Our team took inspiration from our competitive analysis, interviews, rapid sketching, and whiteboard sketching activities, to design our prototypes. We focused on the onboarding experience, general interface design, and the mental health screening of the caregiver experience.

Onboarding

Onboarding helps accustom user for best experience.

General UI Design

Main features include customizable homepage, calendar, and community tab.

Mental Health Screening

Health screening helps users maintain physical and mental health

💭 Ideation Session

We introduced nine participants to our problem space in order to gain insights on our mid-fidelity designs, see new perspectives on our problem space and user group, and to inform the protocol for our co-design workshop.

This informed our workshop protocol in which we focused on three things:
  • Understanding the lived experiences of our participants
  • Evaluation of our mid-fidelity prototypes
  • Reflection on pain points and opportunities
User Flow Sketch
Medication Screen Sketch from Design Charrette

💡 Takeaways

  • Many of our participants put emphasis on the reminders and calendar feature.
  • Medical information should be accessible on any page of the application.

VALIDATION

Testing our assumptions with high-fidelity prototypes

I began to transform our mid-fidelity prototypes into high-fidelity in order to create a more refined, intuitive, and interactive prototype that would allow us to receive detailed feedback from our testing sessions.

Mid-Fidelity Screens
Hi-Fidelity Screens

🧩 Co-Design Workshop

I helped create a Miro board with 4 different activities to successfully gain valuable insights from our user group. I was able to lead two out of the four activities: Design Charrette and Day in The Life Reflection.

💡Takeaways:

  • Medical screening was impractical.
  • Social media has been helpful in the past.
  • Medical information screens were disorganized.
Based on these takeaways from the workshop, our team reevaluated our three prototype components.

THE REFINEMENT

Last minute pivots that elevated the caregiving experience

Shifting from a mental health screening to a community page

From our discussions, one participant stated, "A health screening is a great idea, but it should definitely be more interactive. Surveys tend to raise stress levels, and we want something that puts us at ease."

‍Considering that our team had time constraints, we decided to transform the mental health screening into a community page based on the users location. Caregivers have excessive stress when finding resources, and a community page would allow for more resources ultimately minimizing the stress.

Iterating on the Medical Information screen

Our mid-fidelity prototypes were lacking the need for multiple doctors and the ability to search for specific medical information. Patients often go to multiple doctors and each one supplies them with different medical info. Considering this, our team decided to include both of these options.

THE REFINEMENT

Testing, testing, and more testing

In order to test how seamless the Figma prototype was, we created a usability testing protocol and conducted testing with two UX Designers.

💡 Takeaways

  • Content overload
  • Certain text should be emphasized
  • Calendar screen is color-busy

⌚️Creating the cross-channel experience

Purpose

To make caregiving an easier and less time-consuming job by giving them everything they need in one application using a variety of technologies.

Smart Speaker
Apple Watch

The home speaker interaction is explained in the final design video while the Apple Watch screens were designed in Figma. A/B testing was conducted on two versions of the watch screen.

A/B Testing

The goal was to discover which design was more effective through participant consideration.
Apple Watch Notification Screen
The design on the right was preferred due to how it was less distracting and it fit the original design of Apple Watch notifications.

Final Iterations

In correlation of our participants concern about completing tasks twice, we incorporated the cross-channel experience to notify each caregiver when a task has been completed. With these iterations, we came to our final design.

THE REFINEMENT

Bringing the designs to life

Along with the app design, we were also challenged to create a design system and a brand. With the time allotted, our team was unable to check for copyright and planned to do so if they project was taken to the next level.

🎈 Bonus: Check out our showcase video here!

Reflecting on the Power of Empathy

As I delved into understanding the needs, challenges, and emotions of caregivers, I realized that true empathy extends beyond the digital realm. It involves actively listening to their stories, frustrations, and aspirations. This project has solidified my belief that empathy is not just a design principle; it's the cornerstone of designing solutions that genuinely make a positive impact on people's lives.