Case study Helios
What can we do for the thousands of patients with smartphones admitted into our clinics every day?
The Smart.Helios team 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". The provided research was distilled into obvious, very obvious, and even more obvious questions. Those things that every patient aks when admitted into hospital, i.e. today this would have been a chatbot.
1st screen of the animated website
The simplest of all questions: Are you in hospital?
2nd screen of the animated website
The four most frequent questions and the opportunity to enter a question.
This patient wishes to join the hospital wi-fi
Simple question - do you have an account or not?
Help with the account to use the wi-fi
The hospital wi-fi required an account.
Help in adding a password for the account
Assistance in the form of in-line validation.
Animated UI providing instant feedback and a sense of easy progress
Animated GIF demonstrating the fluid interaction of the website.
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.
A user flow like this shows how patients are welcomed by the website application, how they "move" through it, what they see, how they respond, and sets up a blueprint for the application.
Our proof of concept was a clickable prototype for testing purposes, which I took to a clinic in Berlin, and tested with in-house patients, and some of their relatives.
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.