ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES:

Product Designer working on an Agile team composed of Software Engineers, Product Owner, Scrum Master and Quality Engineer. Responsible of all UI and UX related duties of our product, while collaborating with other team members during ideation phases.

• Designing the web platform for healthcare professionals

• Designing the MVP of the iOS version of the app for patients

• User testing and research to obtain product feedback and insight on user's needs

• Meeting stakeholders for requirement gatherings

• Assisting dev team during the development process

CHALLENGES & PROBLEMS TO SOLVE:

Designing a solution that brings value to the healthcare professionals in their day to day lives, for various specialties. Meaning various user types with different needs and ways of working.

Another challenge was to design for the elderly patients who were using or going to use our product. Most of the diabetic patients are 60 years old and above. With very little knowledge about technology (not tech savvy ). This is where being able to prototype, test quickly and as much as possible with our users became crucial in the design process of the product.

Defining and designing the solution:

One of the most important part in defining and designing the solution was to go meet the different types of users we were planning to onboard on our platform, the different personas we had identified. The different healthcare professionals and their patients.

research:

Users and field research were vital to the success of the product. We learned a lot from this process, from the operating systems of the users to the screen resolutions and also how much time per day they would be able to dedicate to our platform. In the bigger picture, what the product had to offer in order to have a positive impact in their day to day lives.

AGILE methodology:

Working in an AGILE framework meant that every 2 weeks, the team had to release new feature or improvements to the platform for our users. So every week, user testing sessions were organized with either healthcare professionals or patients to test the design or prototypes before they were sent to the developers.

Onboarding of patients at the hospital:

A challenge we faced early on in the project was the onboarding of the elderly patient onto our platform. Patients needed to enter a lot of personal information in order to register on our platform.

We initially decided to have the registration process within our app for the patients. But we quickly noticed that a lot of the patients had difficulty even finding and downloading the app from the apple store, this was due to most of the patients not being used to downloading apps on their device.

So we then decided to let the healthcare professionals kickstart the registration on their side from the web platform. They would send an invitation on their patient's phone from the web platform. In this SMS invitation message the patient would be invited to press a link which would redirect them on a web page with a registration form. And when the form was completed, they would be redirected again to the app's store page.

This helped us smooth out the registration process and have more users on our app. We were able to onboard 30 new patients within a month with this new flow. Compared to an average of 10 patients per month with the older flow.

DESIGNING A MEDICATION SUGGESTION TOOL:

A great opportunity presented itself to our product when we started to work with one the of the biggest hospital in Montreal for a project that was aimed to decrease medical inertia. This ambitious project would be translated to a section of our product that would suggest medications that a heart failure or diabetic patient would have to take according to the Canadian Guidelines.

Key meetings, workshop and user testing sessions with prototypes were organized for this complex issue. In order to gather requirements, confirm assumptions and hypothesis with the medical staff. These back and forth were extremely important for the success of this project. The list of requirements from a medical perspective was very long and sometimes not obvious for everyone. That's why as stated above the user testing sessions were important to gather feedback and iterate, to make sure we were going in the right direction in terms of design and information architecture.

We had to enable the healthcare professionals to clearly visualize the different classes and add any specific medication to the profile of the patient with the desired posology.

Each class of medication has their own set of rules or criteria that had to be respected before prescribing them to a patient. All these requirements had to be available in the user interface of our product, that was one of the biggest challenge with that project. How to have all the information available, but not overwhelm the user interface with so much information and keep it clear. We wanted to indicate visually if the patient was outside the rules/criteria for every class of medication. To indicate to the doctors and nurses that prescribing some medications could represent some risks to the patient.

We also wanted to display the status of the medication and the class. So that the healthcare professionals could in one glance, see which class the patient is already taking; which one he should be taking but isn't taking; which one he shouldn't be taking and which one he is taking but shouldn't be taking. And of course as stated above we wanted to give the option of the healthcare professionals to directly add the desired medications to our existing medication table available on all the patient's profiles.

A rich experience:

Working as the sole product designer in a startup like Greybox Solutions was an amazing experience for me. The fast paced environement and the AGILE methodology while working with all the stakeholders felt like every 2-3 months a new chapter was unfolding. With new challenges that made me grow as a problem solver, It has been my most valuable and rewarding experience so far.