Image requests and inbox
The Project Brief
As the UX/UI Designer at iPlato Healthcare, I was tasked with finding a way for the Buddy Messenger product to allow GPs to request documents and images from their patients and receive their responses, in order to comply with requirements from NHS England for GP’s to minimise physical patient interaction during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
My Role
UX/UI Designer
The Team
Product Manager
.NET Developer
React developer
Backend developer
Duration
5 months
The Problem
As a result of COVID-19, there was a need for practices to keep as much patient interaction online as possible, as opposed to face-to-face.
Patients had to wait for vital documents to arrive by post as opposed to physically picking them up at the practice and GP’s were required to carry out the majority of their consultations remotely, however telephone appointments were inadequate in situations where a visual diagnosis was required.
Research
Buddy Messenger is a windows application that practice staff can use alongside their clinical system. When launched, it picks up whatever patient you have selected on your clinical system, allowing the clinician to quickly shoot off an SMS or carry out a video consultation. The patient did not need to download any apps on their device to attend the video call and just need to open a link and confirm their DOB.
The issue we found during user research was that there was a high rate of abandonment of the video consultation feature due to a number of issues, such as clunky UX when it came to inviting a patient to a consultation to choppy video quality because of dependence on signal strength or bandwidth on the patient or practice side. This meant there were questions around the value of the Buddy product and usage decreased.
Findings
What the user research also found was practice staff would really benefit from a product that allowed:
1 ) Patients to send high quality photos of a physical ailment that could then be triaged by clinicians
2) Practice staff could send documents to patients, such as hospital referrals or test results, as opposed to patients visiting the practice to pick them up.
The Buddy product was in a great position to cover the problems that GPs were having and make the product relevant again.
User flows & Wireframes
Based on the qualitative research and the competitor analysis of other products that provided similar solutions, I started to work on the high-level flows and wireframes for the two features.
First, I looked at the image/document request user journey. With the aim of covering any potential issues for optimal UX, such as guidance for best photo quality for patients and covering all scenarios, such as a mixture of docs and images and what if they reach file size limits.
I then worked on the Inbox where the patient photo would land. While working on the wireframes I would make notes of all the small features and requirements which I later presented to the Product Manager and Product Lead, in order to figure what we wanted to keep for MVP and what we could bring or validate if required later.
Finally, I worked on the document sending from practice to patient.
User Testing
After going through a few iterations on the different UI which spans across Buddy and the Web app where patients can send their photos and receive documents, I moved on to creating prototypes which we would present to internal and customer stakeholders in order to gather feedback and validate if we are moving in the correct direction.
Final UI
Based on the user feedback on the prototypes and after a few more iterations on the designs, it was handed over to the devs.
Photo request and patient response
From Buddy, the Clinician user would tick a box which allowed the patient to reply to the SMS message. From the patient’s POV, when they receive the SMS asking them to provide a photo, a unique link is embedded which they can follow. Once they open the link, they verify their identity first which allows them to then give a written response alongside attaching up to 5 photos.
There was discussion around whether to keep the CTA at the bottom of the screen in order to force users to read the guide for photo quality.
Buddy Inbox
As the patient sends back their response to the practice, it lands in the Buddy inbox. The clinician can open the Buddy inbox section where they can see all the ‘Open’ responses which need to be actioned. Once the Buddy user has viewed and saved the response in the clinical system, they mark the response as Done.
In the first version, due to time constraints, we opted out of having a filter or search, however I still designed a few version ahead so were ready to work on the next version.
Sending Documents to Patients
For the first version, the patient’s requests were sent as an email to the practice. We had to do this in order to make the deadline for the feature. We knew this was not ideal and would put off a lot practices from using the feature. However, it allowed to start trialing the feature early and getting some feedback.
