Redesigning a hospital mobile app with hospitality and patient experience in mind.
As a designer for my major’s capstone project (HCDE @ UW), our team was sponsored by Seattle Children’s Hospital to evaluate and redesign their mobile app in order to improve hospitality and wayfinding. Through our redesigns, my team was able to decrease patient-rated difficulty of tasks by an average of 17%, reducing friction within the app and promoting a seamless patient experience.
Duration
6 months
Role
Product Designer
Team
1 PM, 1 Researcher, 2 Designers
Initial Research
We started with a kickoff call with the Seattle Children’s team to understand how the mobile app is currently used.
Some of our questions included:
What purpose does the app serve vs the website?
What are the most used features by patients?
What do you observe as lacking in the app currently?
Main Insight
The mobile app currently functions primarily as a gateway to the website and MyChart, but doesn't do a great job at highlighting hospital amenities and resources.
70% of links on the home page merely redirected users to the SCH website and MyChart. The team noted that this made it difficult for users to discover hospital amenities and resources, and emphasized that they wanted redesigns to focus on enhancing hospitality and wayfinding for patients and families.
Competitor Analysis
With this focus in mind, we looked at apps known for their accessibility and hospitality to start our research process.
We selected companies from a wide range of industries outside healthcare to bring fresh perspectives in.
Opportunities for improvement:
Search filtering, especially location based filtering (Airbnb)
Personalization of content & suggested searches (ChildrensLA, NYT, PBS Kids)
Intuitive chunking of information / resources (GOV.UK)
Interviews
We conducted 5 interviews with current app users to understand their perspectives, too.
Our team protected sensitive patient information by using non-personal accounts and omitting personally-identifiable information in interview transcripts. Our questions included:
What do you typically use the mobile app for?
What features do you like most about the app?
What features or aspects do you think could be further improved with the mobile app?
Usability Testing
For each interview, we asked participants to complete task based scenarios to identify gaps in the app's functionality and understand user expectations.
Task 1 - General
Find hospital main campus & suitable dining location, save to favorites.
Task 2 - Resources
Find information for cell phone chargers, interpreter services, and Ocean 8 Parking.
Task 3 - Map
Find the nearest elevator from Forest 1 entrance & a family lounge on the 5th floor.
Research Synthesis
Our interviews and usability testing revealed 3 key problems we wanted to address.
1: Lack of awareness about hospital resources and amenities
“There’s actually a lot in there I didn’t realize was there like movies and games. It’s nice to have all of that.”
"The resources are pretty handy...I didn’t realize you could look up the menu in the cafeteria.”
2: Unclear favorites management
3/5 users struggled to access their favorited resources.
“I guess I don’t know how to actually find my favorites once I favorite them.”
“If I was to favorite the family resource center, I’m not really sure where I’d go to view that.”
3: Underutilized search bar
4/5 users used the search bar to look for resources, despite there being a dedicated resources page under Locations tab.
“I noticed that the search bar…wasn’t speaking to me like you could find things within the app. For me, the search bar is kind of like Google."
Ideation
Following our research, we hosted a collaborative workshop with the SCH team to present our findings and align on the most beneficial redesigns.
We collectively ranked redesigns of specific pages and features by impact and effort, ultimately landing on these 3 priorities:
Resources: HMW improve discoverability of hospital resources?
Favorites: HMW make the favorites feature more visible to the user?
Search Bar: HMW redesign the search bar to help users find more personalized resources?
Our feature prioritization matrix
Feature Ownership
I took ownership over improving favorites management and enhancing search functionality for users.
Additionally, I helped set my team up for success by copying over the Design System sent to us by the SCH Team, Auto-Layouting some template screens, and creating reusable components that the other designer on my team could use to explore different design directions.
#1: How might we nudge users to explore and favorite their most used resources?
We learned from user interviews that not all users were aware of hospital resources or a favorites feature. I explored multiple ways of introducing the favorites feature to encourage users to discover and save resources.
I chose the popup modal as the preferred vehicle for promoting favorites. The popup modal encourages exploration of resources, without taking up home page real estate.
#2: How might users view and manage their favorites across multiple campuses?
After users add their favorites, they need a centralized place to view and manage them. I explored how we could display favorited resources across various campuses seamlessly.
I chose the tab bar option, as it avoids overwhelming the user with information for multiple locations, whilst also minimizing scroll fatigue.
#3: How might we aid users in finding resources from the search bar without overwhelming them?
We learned from interviews that 4/5 users used the search bar to find resources instead of the actual resources tab. I wanted to introduce filtering to the search bar, so that users could quickly find the most relevant resources and amenities without any friction.
I chose Version 2 as the preferred method of filtering, as it allows for both location and popularity-based filtering to occur without the user having to make their filtering selections on another popup or page.
Usability Testing
After countless iterations, we tested our redesigns with 20 users on Maze.
Using an asynchronous platform like Maze allowed us to reach more users and collect more quantitative data about the efficacy of our redesigns.
Participant-rated difficulty of each task:
1: Find & favorite main campus
2.17/5
Original
1.7/5
Redesign
↓9.4% difficulty
2: Find resources from search
2.25/5
Original
1.4/5
Redesign
↓17% difficulty
3: Access favorited resources
2.65/5
Original
1.4/5
Redesign
↓25% difficulty
Participant quotes:
"Very user friendly — much better than past experience on the app! Most items were very easy to find within the design."
"Thank you for all your work. This was much easier to use!"
"More studies like this please!"
Next Steps
We also noted areas for improvement to inform future redesigns.
"Design is intuitive for easy navigation, but maybe too many suggestions shown at once (e.g., search page), which can be distracting."
Consider scaling back the filtering to just popular searches for each location.
"Good; could add scroll bars or arrows to show more options in each section."
Show that the user can scroll horizontally to view more resources.
"More detailed maps with pictures for reference for directionally challenged individuals"
Include pictures in the navigation within the map itself (like Google Street View)
Final Designs
The new mobile experience encourages resource discovery through easier favorites management, location-based search, and favorites integration with maps.
Favorites
Access your most visited locations and resources, now from the home page.
Location-based search
Use location based search with category filters to discover nearby amenities.
Favorites Integration with Maps
Find directions to your favorited resources directly from maps.
Next Steps
Extending the redesign beyond the capstone.
Due to time constraints, our team wasn’t able to fully incorporate the insights from Maze testing into another iteration. With more time, I'd like to explore how we could improve the map and wayfinding experience for wheelchair users (and explore filtering on the map interface), and how we could further refine the search filters to avoid overwhelming users.
My wonderful capstone group: Omar, Nathan (me), Tiffany, and Matthew!
Reflection
Learnings & Lessons
I'm very proud of my team and the work we were able to accomplish in 5 months. Along the way, I also carried some valuable lessons that I'll take with me into my next role:
The value of probing: During user interviews, I took a proactive role in asking clarifying questions to users. If a user struggled to find a resource and rated the task difficulty high, I'd ask questions like "where would you expect to find this resource?" Doing so helped our team better understand the user's expectations and identify what about the current design didn't meet them.
Learn to dig not only into your user's needs, but also the needs of your team: I went into this capstone with the mindset that no task was out of my scope. The non-design tasks I supported (drafting recruitment email pitches, creating interview and survey questions, and writing research summary reports) helped me to see the bigger picture and understand how we all collectively advocate for the user.
Tradeoffs are in everything: Decision paralysis was very common. In those moments, I focused on articulating tradeoffs of each solution and keeping our North Star (helping users discover hospital resources) in mind. This process made me a lot more confident in my recommendations to the team, and allowed me to gather feedback for more iterations!