Enabling accountability in health goals for mothers & mothers-to-be

InovCares

My Role: User Research, Affinity Mapping, User Flow, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing (1 of 3 in UX Team)

Duration: Aug 2022 - Sept 2022

Tools: Figma, Asana, Maze - Usability Testing, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Google Drive

InovCares - Patient is a comprehensive telehealth mobile app that delivers care at your fingertips. Empowering women, primarily women of color, to take control of their health and well-being.

InovCares wants to attract mothers and mothers-to-be to their platform by increasing user engagement and satisfaction.

The goal of this project was to conduct research, identify critical users’ pain points and current KPIs, and propose a design solution that will enable InovCares to attract new users by motivating them to return to the app daily.

Background

With the recent pandemic, it has become more apparent that the prevalence of poor health outcomes in underserved communities is partly due to limited access to healthcare. Telehealth platforms can mitigate this by bringing care to these communities. I want to encourage the growth and adequate distribution of culturally competent, emphatic physicians and healthcare resources in disadvantaged areas by working alongside InovCares and furthering their mission to do just that.

I've been extremely fortunate to have worked with InovCares’ CEO, Mohamed Kamara, to accomplish the things I have listed below:

  • Transformed the Health Tribes concept into a product. We worked closely with Mr. Kamara to shape the vision for the Health Tribes section into a fully-fledged community for engagement between mothers and physicians. While they are in the process of developing our designs, being able to see how much our team has grown has been extremely rewarding.

  • Establishing a design system for the mobile app. There was only a design system available for their desktop website, drastically different from their current mobile app designs. I established a design system that expanded upon the existing colors on their mobile app to help the engineering and product teams create consistency and improve efficiency.

  • Improved Usability across the Health Tribes section. InovCares conducted no usability testing prior to development, but since implementing our designs, we have conducted formative testing and UX research into every aspect of design.

THE PROBLEM

Moms and moms-to-be need a community where they feel comfortable, motivated, and supported by one another to help achieve their health goals.

THE SOLUTION

Provide a community of like-minded users and increase customer return rates through gamification, and user engagement with one another and clinicians.

USER RESEARCH

We interviewed 6 mothers, our target users, who shared their experiences during and after pregnancy and what they would have benefitted from.

I found that all participants:

  • Want to connect with other moms

  • Seek more support

  • Experience some issues either with mental or physical health during pregnancy/postpartum

PERSONA

Sharon Adams

“I want to take control of my health and engage with other moms.”

Age: 27

Location: Dallas, TX

Status: Married & pregnant with her 1st child

Occupation: Hair Stylist

Salary: $57k

Bio: Sharon is 3 months pregnant with her 1st child. She recently moved to Dallas, and wants to connect with other moms and pregnant women to feel support and seek advice as she has so many questions and often feels overwhelmed. She understands the importance of being in a good mental and physical state, but needs more support and motivation to stay on track in achieving her health and activity goals.

Frustrations

  • Doesn’t have other women around who are going through the same experience

  • She is worried about gaining weight and her high blood sugar

Needs

  • Wants to connect with other moms

  • Wants to have somebody holding her accountable on her journey to attain her health and activity goals

Sharon’s Problem

We hypothesized ways in which we could help Sharon find a community through InovCares where she feels comfortable, welcomed, motivated, and supported by other mothers to achieve her health goals.

How Might We?

  1. Help InovCares increase user engagement and atract new users?

  2. Help Sharon and other mothers feel connected and supported by one another?

  3. Create a trustworthy environment in which Sharon and her tribe members feel comfortable sharing their health goals?

EXPLORATORY RESEARCH

I researched the topic of pregnancy, social support, and motivation and found an article on “First-Time Mothers’ Perceptions of Social Support” published in the National Library of Medicine that states,

“Although partners and family have been found to be relied upon most, peers provide an element of appraisal, security and self-confidence for new mothers.”

“A peer is defined as ‘someone who possesses experiential knowledge of a specific stressor or condition and similar characteristics as the potential recipient.’”

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

The overall Unique Value Proposition of telehealth-related companies is to bridge the connection between the patient and the doctor without a physical facility.

Gamification also promotes engagement with multiple apps and encourages users to come back time after time. Nike Run Club and Apple Activity are popular with their users because of the ability to compete with their friends in a safe, controlled, and healthy environment.

  • Focus on engagement and interactivity

  • Bridge the connection between the patient and the doctor

  • No focus on a specific target audience

  • Gamification features - common among health related apps

FORMATIVE USABILITY TESTING

InovCares has a Health Tribe concept in which primary users would engage with one another and keep track of their health goals. I wanted to understand how users navigated through the current Health Tribe section via formative testing. I asked users to complete specific tasks to gauge how well the Tribe aspect performed and its overall functionality for the features we wanted to implement.

Goals

  • Identify bugs and issues with the app

  • Reveal friction points & confusing experiences

  • Discover opportunities

Tasks

  1. Create a new Health Tribe

  2. Invite people to your tribe

  3. Add more than one tribe

  4. Set your own health goals

  5. Delete or leave your tribe

ALIGNING GOALS

Before developing potential solutions, we wanted to align the goals between the business and the users to benefit both.

JOURNEY MAP

PROSPECTIVE USER FLOW

MID-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

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USABILITY TESTING

Goal:

This study aims to assess first-time users' learnability when using the InovCares mobile app prototype. We would like to assess how users flow through the mobile app from exploring the home page to finding their Health Tribes, messaging their Tribe and individual users, and finding and creating new Tribes.

89% of users were able to complete a task compared to having only 25% complete tasks in the original app.

Also, we reduced a quarter of user errors with this prototype and decreased the time on the task by 17%, while our SUS score improved by 37.9 points.

STYLE GUIDE

ITERATIONS: MID FIDELITY → HIGH FIDELITY

  • Users did not expect the health tribes section to include their personal goals → create 2 different header navigation buttons on the home screen to allow users to go directly into their individual activity or their Health Tribes.

  • The heat map relayed that users went to members' profiles to view their activity instead of through the 'Weekly Challenge' → I removed the profiles at the top of the tribe to make room for a list of members' profiles under the 'Weekly Challenge' and added their activity to their profile.

FINAL USABILITY TESTING RESULTS COMPARISON

With these few changes, task completion rose to 100%, and we cut the average number of errors in half from our mid-fidelity prototype and by 60% from our original app. Our SUS score increased by 52.9% compared to our original app, and users found it two times easier to complete tasks.

USABILITY TESTING THE HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

In order to make this experience for mothers as easy and clear as possible we went through another round testing.

A/B TESTING

4/6 users were confused with the screen on the left:

  • Clicked on the number, not the pen icon

  • Found the icon too small - hard to click

  • Action completion indication was not clear

I changed the activity screen to one entire summary where users could click on each activity and edit.

6/6 users liked the redesign on the right:

  • Found the screens easy to navigate and intuitive

  • Did not experience any difficulties

When accessing the chat feature to message individual members, users clicked into the group chat or the expanded activity section, so we kept our original idea of having user profiles at the top since we had 100% task completion and a 4.5 average on the ease of use.

When finding a Health Tribe, users did not immediately understand the recommendations below the search bar, so we made it evident, stating they were tribe recommendations based on their location.

Using all of these iterations and the pain points we identified from our users, we transformed the Health Tribes community with the features that the target audience (mothers) would want to help InovCares grow and maintain its customer base.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

Change is an opportunity for improvement. InovCares initially wanted us to create an electronic medical record system. However, since I have previous experience as a medical scribe and know how EMR systems work and how complex they are, I knew that this wouldn't be a feasible task within our time constraints.

Advocate for the user. I also interviewed several doctors and asked them how they would feel, how intuitive it would be to use a mobile app to chart their patient interactions, and if they were willing to do that. However, a lot of feedback was that physicians would most likely not use a mobile platform to input patient information for privacy reasons, accessibility, and convenience.

Research now can save time later (and time is money!). I knew I had to present enough research on what it took to implement an EMR system onto the app. And present it in a way that would be thorough and cover specific points as to why the particular direction that he wanted us to go may not be the best and maybe be using a different approach.

I began with an in-depth analysis of other competitors of telehealth companies and other EMR systems to see how they implemented their features.

I presented this research and my findings from users to Mr. Kamara during our next client meeting. So in the future, if his developers or another one of his teams wanted to look into implementing an EMR system, they could also have research available to them.

Prove where you can bring value as a designer. When we first talked with Mr. Kamara, he told us he wanted to target mothers primarily. So, I explored the patient side of the app, noticed many functionality issues, and showed him where we could bring value to his business by improving the Health Tribes feature. He was receptive to that idea and the research that I had done for this potential feature.

PROTOTYPE

NEXT STEPS

  1. Flushing out the communicative features within the app to continue following InovCares social policy.

  2. Implementing Fitcoin rewards within Tribes increases users' incentive to return to the app, check in with their tribes, and, most importantly, have a support system and remain healthy.

  3. Incorporate a potential template for Electronic Medical Record Systems to allow doctors to monitor their patient's health goals and more.

  4. Create an onboarding experience to help users understand each screen and the features of the InovCares patient app.

Next

Treating Epocrates