Bloomage teaches you the ins and outs of patient health portals through step by step tutorials.
My Role
User research
Usability Testing
UX Copywriting
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Logo Design
Team
Georgia Kamenova
Luz Cruz
Irene Rivera
Context
In 2018 the U.S. Census Bureau stated that by 2030, 1 in 5 residents would be of retirement age. As the older adult population is growing rapidly so is technology. This statistic guided our team to explore how older adults are interacting with health portals.
Challenge
How might we instill trust and confidence in the older adult population to use online health portals?
As a team we set out to conduct several interviews with older adults and uncovered trust and lack of confidence as a reoccurring theme.
Solution
In 9 weeks create an easy to use mobile app with step by step tutorials for completing tasks in patient health portals.
Research
Vision problems discourage mobile phone usage. Also, traits such as lack of confidence and trust in using technology were reoccurring.
We conducted interviews on 9 participants, ranging from ages 60-79 years old. We uncovered that most participants preferred to make doctor's appointments over the phone. Additionally, there is awareness of patient health portals but most don't use them. A majority of our participants primary device is an i-Phone.
Interview Participant at Emeritus College
Interview Participant at Hollywood West Neighborhood Center
Interview Participant at Sherman Oaks Health & Rehab Center
Dive deeper into my research planning and process here in the slide presentation.
Synthesis
Affinity Mapping our interview insights shows reoccurring patterns of mistrust in technology, lack of confidence in tech usage and bad vision discouraging mobile usage.
Piecing together the commonalities helped our team create robust personas.
Remote affinity mapping session
Personas and User Journey
Click to view details for Jay Liso
Click to view details for Karen Mares
Click to view details for Liz Brixton
Our persona Liz is a busy grandmother. Not being able to pick up her grand daughter on time is a big pain point. However, she understands the importance of her health management so she sacrifices her time to set an appointment. In addition, lack of assurance that she has completed her task leaves her disappointed.
Click to view details of user journey for Liz
User Flow
We determined the MVP through our personas pain points. The most talked about task in our interviews was making a doctor's appointment. Followed by requesting medication refill and lab results. We focused on what the process would look like for a user going through Making An Appointment tutorial. Which we would then want to user test in the next phase.
User Flow Task - "Making an Appointment"
Low fidelity Wireframes
We decided on a email, social media and guest onboarding process and minimizing tutorial steps.
A wireframe crit session helped us agree on what to construct in the low fidelity prototype. We took into account what core gestures we would want to incorporate, what the content tone might be and what kind of feedback loops would occur.
My low-fidelity wireframes
Critique session on our low-fidelity wireframes
User Testing
Testing our prototype reveals login is invasive, scrolling comes naturally and measuring tutorial duration is preferred in steps.
We tested our prototype on several participants. They did not want to make an account or login in to use the tutorial. An educational tone was preferred over friendly. Swiping and scrolling was way most of our participants navigated through the app but a majority of them said they preferred buttons. Steps over time was preferred by most to measure how long a tutorial would take.
User Test Participant #1
User Test Participant #2
User Test Participant #3
User Test Participant #4
See the slide presentation for the teams User Testing set up.
High fidelity prototype
With user testing feedback we created our team was able to refine the prototype. Check out the changes we made below
Reflection
1. Ethical Design
Going out in the field to gather insights was exciting and difficult at times. We learned a lot about older adults and their relationship with mobile technology. But we also faced the hard truth of their adverse feelings towards technology. As a group we had to tread lightly and be extremely cautious. We kept this in mind throughout the whole process. Although, our product aimed to ease the lives of older adults, we also have to be aware that we cannot push a product on our users.
2. Keeping it Simple
The tutorial instruction is a generalized overview of how patient health portals work. I kept running into the problem of developing concise instructions, along with creating a tone that was appropriate to the demographic. I’m hoping with time and practice, I will be able to master UX writing.
3. Further Development
Another pain points that we uncovered is that there is a lack of Spanish resources on how to use patient health portals. Unfortunately due to time constraints we could not explore creating a Spanish version but hope to do it in the future with our team.