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Case Study

eHealth - Helios

What can we do for the thousands of patients with smartphones admitted into our clinics every day?

Logo of Helios

The task in a nutshell

The team at Smart.Helios showed me what they had learned from a professional researcher: that virtually all patients entering a hospital or clinic, brought a smartphone with them (which was not really a surprise).
And that virtually all patients start by asking the staff virtually the same questions.
My task was to explore ways of helping the patients with answers, and the staff by alleviating the load on them.

Challenge
  • Majority of patients are not tech-savvy
  • NLP (natural language processing) à la IBM's Watson et al. meant sending data to the USA
  • Data protection laws in eHealth are extremely strict
  • Analysis
  • The "decision tree" covering the most frequently asked questions & their answers wasn't very large, at least in phase 1
  • The UI needed to be really simple
  • Solution
  • Focus on smartphone usage
  • A simple 'clickbot' which any one could use
  • Role
  • UX Designer
  • Researcher
  • + Interviews
  • + Focus Groups
  • + Usability Tests
  • Tools
  • Paper & Pen
  • Sketch
  • Flinto
  • Deliverables
  • Customer Flows
  • Wireframes
  • Layouts
  • Prototypes
  • Screens showing the screens "in action"

    First screen of the animated website.
    Second screen of the animated website.
    Simple question - do you have an account or not.
    Help in setting up an account.
    Help in adding a password for the account.
    Animated GIF demonstrating the fluid interaction of the website.

    How does it all hang together?

    After many sketches, and thousands of post-it notes on walls, I knew where each question and answer within the "descision tree" would lead to, and what exactly would appear on which page.
    That knowledge needed to be made available to all.
    And that is best communicated by visualizing the user flow.
    This is a small section of the digitalized flow that I made.

    Small section of the user flow.

    A user flow like this shows how patients are welcomed by the application, how they "move" through it, what they see, how they respond, and sets up a blueprint for the application.

    But then what happened?

    At this relatively early stage, where I had pressed on with a clickable prototype for testing purposes, we had our proof of concept.
    The next stage would normally be fine concept... exploring those lovely little UI details that help make an application special, and nitty-gritty discussions with developers (front-end, back-end, DevOps etc.). Unfortunately, the setup at Smart.Helios at the time was incomplete, and there were no engineers... we decided to wait with any further work until the team was on board.
    I prepared everything for a hand-over to the product manager, and moved on.

    Link to Alex B.'s profile on linked-in  Link to Alex B.'s profile on xing

    Alex B. - UX Designer & Researcher - Berlin based - Case Study - Helios

    Lean UX & iterative design
    Data-driven
    Evidence-based
    Build - measure - learn
    Husband to a lovely wife
    Dad of two brilliant girls
    Fan of two-wheeled transport

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