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 unique purpose does the app serve vs the website?
What are the features most used by patients?
What do you observe as lacking in the app currently?
MAIN INSIGHT
The mobile app 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 this made it difficult for users to discover hospital amenities and resources, and hoped for a redesign that improves 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 tasks within the app 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
From our interviews and usability testing, 3 key problems emerged.
IDEATION
We presented our findings to the SCH team and held a collaborative workshop to 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: improve discoverability of hospital resources
Favorites: make the favorites feature more visible to the user
Search Bar: redesign the search bar to help users find more personalized resources
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 template screens, and creating reusable components that the other designer on my team could use to explore different design directions.
EXPLORATION #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.
EXPLORATION #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 on one screen, whilst also minimizing scroll fatigue.
EXPLORATION #3
How might we help users find 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.
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:
Here's what pilot users said about the redesigns:
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 experience for first time visitors, and how we could further refine the search filters to give users more personalized resources.
REFLECTION
Learnings & Lessons
I'm very proud of my team and the work we were able to accomplish! 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, even if we bring different strengths and areas of expertise.
Tradeoffs are in everything: In moments of decision paralysis, I focused on articulating tradeoffs of each solution and keeping a strict focus (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!
