Healfies - http://healfies.com
What is healfies?
Healfies is a health startup that helps patients by centralising their health records and connecting them with their health professionals and organisations.
Mobile app redesign
I joined the company to work on the redesign of their mobile app, as it had many usability issues and was built with legacy code. The main idea for the design project of the app was to work with the same business rules of the web app but following Google's Material Design and Apple's Design guidelines for their mobile platforms, which focused on the usability principles for mobile apps.
Methodology
The company was in a hurry to deliver fast the redesign of the mobile app, since they were still relying on investment money, they needed to show results fast to be able to survive until the next round of investments. The scope for the app was quite small, only part of the main features of the web app, focusing on improving primarily the usability and consequently the user experience. Due to this context, I tried to limit user research to guerrilla usability testing with up to 5 users for the v1 of the redesigned app.
The methodology adopted consisted of a heuristics evaluation of the legacy app, to help determine the main usability issues, followed by benchmarking of similar products, sketching and building of a high-fidelity prototype focused on improving the usability issues and applying the interaction design guidelines of Google and Apple for their mobile platforms. The prototype was validated using people that worked in the same coworking place where the startup was installed that fit our personas, basically anyone who had an active health routine taking medicine and visiting doctors and health facilities regularly. After refining the prototype, I built a specs document so the developers could begin building the app. Since there was a shortage of developers to work on this project, I ended up helping to code the frontend using react native.
Web app
The mobile app took a few months to be developed so in the meanwhile I started working on small improvements on the web app. Just like the mobile app, the web app was also hard to use and confusing to new users. Instead of redesigning everything, the first step taken was to add an onboarding feature to new users, to start improving the user experience from the beginning of the user's journey. Since the company also had a stream of new users coming from another product called Healfies Delivery (white label portal for organisations to deliver health results), I also worked on the onboarding for these users so they could flow between products without breaking their experience and also convert more.
I chose to use a simple onboarding feature that introduced to new users the main benefits of the web app, ending with a screenshot showing where everything was located, as a way to reduce the cognitive load of the first usages of the interface. For the users coming from Healfies Delivery I decided that a banner was the best approach to convert these users, since they weren't validated users yet and had to confirm their account by putting their email again and setting up a password. This flow started in the banner, went to the signup process and ended in the onboarding feature showing the top benefits.
After improving the first part of the user's journey (adoption), I started working on the redesign of web app's navigation, with substantial improvements on the primary and secondary navigation levels, including the concept of exchanging credentials where users could have different credential types such as patient, health professional, organisation member and tutor.
The main problem in this redesign was to allow users to switch between different types of accounts and be able to quickly understand the new context. The challenge was to introduce this change without creating a fragmented experience, maintaining a consistent navigation in all the different contexts.
The main decision was to keep the credentials change in the topbar, opening a menu with a overlay to keep the user focused on this change since it affected the whole context underneath. Under the topbar, the interface was divided between a sidemenu with navigation options related to the current credential and the main content area for the active navigation item. This decision helped users to quickly change between different credential and still have the same interaction patterns.
From the navigation redesign I started working on a new feature called Healfies Request, aimed for the American market. I wrote an article about the experience of designing something for a market in/from a different country which can be accessed here.
Even though most of the time the main user research work I did was guerrilla usability testing, the time spent working at Healfies was rich to learn more about a market segment that I hadn't worked yet. Health products have to deal with many different business rules regarding patients, professionals, organisations and governments, sometimes limiting what can be done. Even so, most of the time it's very rewarding to see your work making a difference in other people's lives.
