Case study: Rethinking medical documentation

How Might We transform the end-to-end experience in public hospitals?

Medical records paper in Nairobi, Kenya — Paul J. Brown

This case study is about how with a user centered design thinking we managed to find possible solutions on mobile app for a wicked problem.

During this two weeks, i had to work in group with: Céline Forestier, Tineke Baan and Xavi Almirall on a chosen topic among 4 given ones.

To paraphrase my girl Meredith Grey “For most people, a hospital is a scary place”. And what happens when it comes to all the paper documents it generates?

Intro

Hospitals have been really solicited these past years, and a lot of digital health app are booming, especially for consultations. Yet some areas might be missed. So, How Might We transform the end-to-end experience in public hospitals?

Deliverables

• Lean Canvas
• Survey, 9 questions, 86 responses
• Interview, 11 questions, 5 participants
• Survey & Interview results
• Affinity & Empathy Map
• How Might We
• User Persona
• Storyboard & User Journey
• Problem Statement
• Hypothesis Statement
• Ideation
• Lo-Fi wireframes
• Prototype & Concept Testing & Results
• Mid-Fi prototype
• Next Steps

Tools: Figma, Miro, Typeform, pen & paper

User research & analysis

The first steps of our research stage were to find a way to collect quantitative data. We used a Lean Survey Canvas template on Miro to put our goals and brainstorm. It was a quick session as we found a way to be really efficient and split the work.

Thanks to our brainstorming session through the lean survey canvas, we composed and shared our survey through different channels (Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp). We managed to collect 86 responses.

Quantitative data from our survey

Interviewees quotes — 5 participants from all Europe between 27yo & 46yo.

We combined all the relevant data in an Affinity Diagram to define concrete pain point themes and made it easy to read with color codes (pink=negative, yellow=neutral, green=positive) & dot voting results.

Main topics from our affinity map.

After sorting and creating main topics in our affinity diagram, we saw 4 blocks: booking appointment, reminders, video calls & documentation. The first one is already well supported with a lot of health tech app like doctolib, reminders are more and more done by the hospitals by email or sms. So between video calls and documentation, we picked the second one as 79% of people from the survey have their medical documentation stored on paper.

Thanks to the Empathy Map, we managed to be in our user’s shoes.
Understand how they would feel and what would surround them on a regular day and see how our solution could help them. And create a more relevant user persona.

How Might We selected by dot voting after brainstorming about our user’s pains.

User persona & User journey

So meet Preoccupied Penelope, our primary user persona. She is the typical empathic friend.

Primary user persona

With this persona, and to target more precisely where are the pain points and possibilities in our user path we also created a storyboard and a user journey map with highlights on when our user could use our product.

Storyboard — You can feel the user pain points with the documentation.

Thanks to the work with the user persona and the user journey we managed to create a problem and hypothesis statements.

Ideation & Sketches

We used the Crazy 8s methodology to brainstorm our ideas and vote with dots to choose our favorite screens. But we had certain goals in our app to achieve:

• Download photos and documents from your phone or just take a photo
• Separated files
• List of (medical) contacts
• A way to know where you stock the paper version
• Settings to adjust luminosity, exposure etc..

Sketches from our kind of Crazy 8s !

Low Fidelity wireframes

We defined a flow to sketch and as we love democracy, use again dot voting to pick best screens one by one of each teammates. Construct a path. And we finally had a “Frankenstein” flow.

Here our flow with each screen selected by dot voting.

And here the final and clean up version of our Low Fidelity

With this cleaned up version, we had the possibility to proceed to concept testing with Figma via Zoom on 2 participants. They had 2 tasks to do : adding & sending a file.

Karolyna during our concept testing session

Testers’ feedbacks

Thanks to our participants we had precious data to improve the prototype :

• Work on our icons to avoid hesitation during the flow
• Decide if the app would have a contact list or just doing it via the user’s phonebook by testing both ways on users.
• Add screen for the missing step

Mid Fidelity wireframes

Then, thanks to all feedbacks, we went forward with our Mid Fidelity prototype and some modifications on Figma.

Figma

Next Steps

Like it was a first project (okay my second first project!), it was very much centered on the researches stage. We would like to provide testings and prototypes in an advanced level and be more familiar with Figma while designing components.

What we learned

During this journey, we realized we had some beginners issues, especially on Figma, but working in group allowed us to dig deeper and we were always improving ourselves.

The perfect product does not exist and there is still researches and tests to do if you want to propose a finest solution. You always have to break your common believes and step up your active listening skills!

I can not wait to share with you my next case study, and if you want to hear a little bit more about me, you can reach me on Linkedin. Thank you for reading and as I am always ready to improve myself I would love to know your thoughts, so feel free to comment !