Role
Founder, Design Lead,
Product Designer,
Frontend Developer
Team
CEO, 2 Medical Specialists,
Content lead, 3 Developers,
3 Designers
Duration
2018.04 - Present
The main objective of Yerbba is to deliver medical-related information properly. As a design lead, I wanted to ensure that Yerbba's reports deliver the appropriate amount of data tailored to individual user so that s/he can make their own healthcare decision. I adjusted design direction three times and honed design ideas to be more detail-oriented through user research methods.
Through three major design iterations, the user interface concept had evolved. Each design iteration has specific objectives.
Collect Ideas
The first step is to find the right item in the healthcare area. And the next step is to know who the breast cancer patients and their caregivers are: what are their needs and how are they dealing with the needs, and how can I help them with the potential product. The main focus of design iterations in this stage is to collect product ideas.
- Consumer Discovery: How people feel about existing patient information platforms, what information and features are missing
- Match needs: What is a mental model for personalized medical information platform, What would be possible direction for the platform
Design A Product
Once I find user needs and what Yerbba can do with them, the next design iteration focus was to make conceptual design a real product.
- Enhance Usability: What are the main factors that prevent users from consume information, how can Yerbba platform provide proper information with intuitive UX.
- Refine Wireframes to Mockup: What factors are needed for the working product.
- Prepare Release: What is the overall impression on the product from the initial access to actual use.
Post Release
The product is live now, but a product can never be perfect. I am recruiting user interviewees and conducting user interviews and collecting feedback from them.
- Customer's Review: What is the trend of potential users' journey in the Yerbba platform, when and why they stop using the platform.
Information overload is a symptom of our desire to not focus on what's important. It is a choice.
First Design Iteration: Needs Findings
Customer Discovery
Through the customer discovery surveys and user interviews, founders browsed major healthcare domains and selected top five disease areas. I created surveys and user interview protocol, and distributed it to relevant open online channels such as reddit. Among the five disease areas, breast cancer got top scores in most of criteria.
Narrowing Down to Breast Cancer
Through customer discovery interviews with eight breast cancer patients and two caregivers, and two physicians, I found their positive interests to acquiring further information about their symptom. Most patients interviewees showed concerns on privacy, reliability of the information, and quality of the information. Also, I confirmed there is a certain need of medical information tailored to individual's conditions, and patient interviewees did not much satisfied by the information from the Patient Portal.
Visualizing Ideas
While I conducted series of customer research and user research, we had intuition of potential key features of the product. I collected and visualized them.
- Ideation
- Design Direction
- Lo-fi prototype
- Lesson Learned
The first iteration is quite far from users' needs. Founders pictures need to be fixed.
Second Design Iteration: Match User Needs
The second design iteration was to find breast cancer patients and their caregivers needs from current Yerbba service.
Problems
Initial UIs might not deal with target users' needs. Also, Founders and I did not have the whole picture of their needs, and so couldn't prioritize the needs. Moreover, the understanding on the project was differ from one member to another.
Research
- Team Brainstorming and Idea Sharing: It is for Yerbba team members to share their ideas and be on the same page. I used Walt Disney Brainstorming and Card Sorting for the sessions.
- Understand Users' Needs: The main focus was to find their needs when they think patient-centered health information platform, especially focusing on breast cancer. I conducted user interview and usability testing.
Design
- Ideation
- User Flow
The design team proceeded to organize the overall experience for the patients when utilizing Yerbba. This flow shows the process of the steps that the patients go through when utilizing this new platform and it was important to keep in mind:
• Help users to get all information without leaving a page
• Allow users to feel safe and secured when utilizing this platform (privacy for medical records)
• Highlight the actionable items (for questions that come up when interacting with the platform)
- Key UI components
UI components are focused on building a information dashboard. All information and features are cramped in one page.
- Lo-fi prototype
Convert a project into a product: Leveling information and allocating information user friendly
Lesson Learned
Although he prior prototype showed impressive progress as a project, I found more to do. Prior version had few drawbacks.
- Unstructured Font Use: Font size are unorganized. Sometimes it's too big for the page, sometimes too small to read. Font style should be standardized.
- Busy Layout: One of main design direction for the prior prototype was to show as many related information as possible so that users can decide their treatment path without losing any important information. And it result in the crowded layout with full of information.
- Lesser Jargons Better Understanding: Medical terminologies are one of the major huddle for patients to understand their conditions well.
- More Personalization With More Automation: Users didn't want to control or play around with the platform. They want to get a fancy report that covers relevant information only about them with minimum controls. The desire of customization came later when they fully understand current status.
- Medical Information Does Not Like The Other Information: light ready-to-go products. it's more serious purchase.
- Credibility Is Important: contents credibility, service security, private information should be well protected.
Refine Wireframes to Mockup
The design team and I designed new UIs/ Design System and conducted user interviews to see our conceptual model is aligned with users' mental models. The content team was also a major input to design UIs for the real product. I can see the difference between conceptual UI design and design for the real product. While design team and I worked on the new design, I checked the new design's technical feasibility and started to build development environment alongside design concepts.
- Lo-Fi Prototype
Prepare Release
The final checklist for the release mostly on technical side, and design team followed up with small requests such as resizing images. I evaluated whether UIs were feasible to be developed and adjusted some UI components into feasible forms.
- Technical Feasibility Check
- First Development with dummy data
- Pseudo product's User Acceptance Testing
Never ending iteration. Not best design, but better design. I realized that the medical platform design should keep updated on medical information and patients need. Should be a common ground between users and medical preciseness.
Customer's Review
I am collecting user's behavior data through Google Analytics to see how the user's interactions are made.
Latest Works
A patient-centered medical information platform for breast cancer patients
A medical reminder system for adolescents to enhance medication adherence
Finding correlation in prescription between mental health and physical health