Setting the scene

Generative Research | Ideation | Prototyping
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Tend is a medical provider that champions patient friendly health services, both online and in clinic. In order to foster a more proactive approach to healthcare, Tend believes that it’s important to empower patients with an understanding of their past and future personal health encounters.

As a group of four, we focused on researching and creating a new resource within their platform that could help patients improve their health literacy and keep track of their health encounters, records and metrics more effectively.
OUR TEAM
This was a collaborative project, we all contributed to each facet along the way. I enjoyed leading the research and affinity mapping sections. We had weekly meetings with Abby Bainbridge-Welch, the Product Designer Lead at Tend, who provided us with valuable direction and critiques throughout the process.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Our Research
We began by gaining a broad understanding of industry standards and patient expectations through a multifaceted approach to research.

Competitor tear-downs and interviews with clinicians, patients, the CX team and our stakeholders all contributed to our understanding of the problem. Our affinity mapping brought to light key actionable insights.
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Who we spoke to

PATIENTS

Eight participants with varying ages, cultural backgrounds and genders.

Diverse representation among our participants allowed us to better understand the unique needs and preferences of different patient populations.

CLINICIANS

Four nurses and two GPs and Tend’s Chief Medical Officer.

Most of these participants worked at Tend, but we also recruited two clinicians who weren’t affiliated with Tend to gain a wider scope of insights.
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What we covered

PATIENTS

Individual interviews.
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Began with a cardsorting activity, where participants rated health topics from least to most important to them personally.
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- Cardsorting activity
- Proactive healthcare
- Health record access
- Health Portals
- Collaboration with clinicians

CLINICIANS

Group interviews with Tend nurses and individual interviews with the GPs and Medical Officer.

- Clinicians history
- Proactive healthcare for patients
- Health record access for patients
- Health Portals
- Collaboration with clinicians
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What we learned

PATIENT INSIGHTS

When affinity mapping we found ten distinct categories of patient findings that allowed us to identify three overarching patient insights.
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Due to experiencing disappointing services both in clinics and via patient portals, participants are reluctant to visit a clinician until they feel they might be suffering from something serious.
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Participants expressed frustration, disappointment and confusion regarding their experiences with health portals and health record access.
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All participants expressed difficulty remembering appointment information, previous health records, immunisations or follow up tests and referrals.

CARDSORTING RESULTS

A graph indicating what the top 10 health topics were for patients. From top to bottom: Results and records, family health history, diet, dental, prescriptions, mental health, vision, BMI, blood pressure, immunisations.

CLINICIAN KEY FINDINGS

We summarised the key points and findings of our clinician interviews separately.
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Open notes are a great reference tool that can help guide patients.
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Clinicians believe patients should have access to their records.
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Poor health literacy negatively impacts patient health outcomes.
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Keeping patients up to date with tests, appointment notes and future screenings could be improved.
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Necessary admin should improve both clinicians and patients experience of healthcare.

For more check out ourFigjam

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
Our Ideation
Our proposed solution was to create a ‘Health Plan’ that empowered patients to engage with their own health and care team.

A crazy 8’s ideation session allowed us to play around with possible solutions before moving onto our lofi wireframes. We experimented with different ways that a patients current or historic health issues could be presented, while also exploring how a patient could collaborate on actionable care plans.

Version 1 added a new menu item to the nav bar
“My Health” and explored pinning health concerns.

Version 2, 3 & 4 explored what health record functions needed to be included in a patient's care plan.

Version 5 explored a tabbed page - separating out the two different sections of Health Concerns and Health Records.

REORGANISING HEALTHCARE
Our IA
Commonly, health apps organise information into separate areas like appointments and medications. Despite many of these separate details being connected to each other. We wanted to bring these elements together and house them in one area.
A large image of the information architecture of the area of the app we worked on

Increase collaboration

Our Opportunity

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Reminders & notifications

Our Solution

Patients have difficulty remembering to attend regular health screenings or adhering to medication. Through utilising notifications, we can help guide patients to health while also taking away some of the unnecessary admin that clinicians are currently faced with.

Reminders and push notifications will improve patients medication adherence and help them stay up to date with health screening appointments.
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Notifications are indicated by an ‘Attention’ exclamation mark icon. We used the Primary Coral as the notification colour to help draw the users attention to notifications.

A woman on her phone with a speech bubble and heart showing a notification
Screens showing the notification features

They told me to go for a smear test and I still haven’t gone so, how do I keep up to date? Yeah, I don’t think I do that well.

Participant F

Increase information

Our Opportunity

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Results & records

Our Solution

Enhancing the general public's health literacy should be a primary concern for health apps. There is an opportunity to better present patients health data in the Tend app to help patients comprehension.

Active and longterm health concerns are included in the 'Health concerns' tab.

The 'Records & results' tab includes other records such as screenings and both new and historic results. We give patients the option to ask a question or to book a follow up appointment.
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We present data in a graph with colour indicators to help patients interpret their results.

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I would be interested in tracking changes to my medical results over time, especially as I get older and may forget previous outcomes.

Participant C

Increase engagement

Our Opportunity

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Logging family history

Our Solution

Current portals are limited in function and don’t actively encourage proactive approaches to health or patient centred engagement with their current, past and future health concerns.

Giving patients the functionality to add and view the family health history on the Tend will increase engagement.
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Despite clinicians not feeling it was necessary, we added this feature as the majority of patients indicated that family health history was of high importance to them during our cardsorting activity.

Having a place where patients have the opportunity to record their own health data will be beneficial to patients.

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Family health history is really important. It would be important if any of my family members have a pre-existing condition that might effect me.

Participant E

LOOKING FORWARD

What's Next

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TALKING TO TEND USERS
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Due to a number of factors, the patients that we interviewed and conducted usability testing on weren’t Tend patients. In the future it would be beneficial to speak to Tend patients specifically about their experiences with the app and clinics.

FURTHER TESTING & IDEATION
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This was a first attempt at creating a ‘health concern’ centred system within the Tend app. There are still lots of possible iterations that could be explored and questions that needed answering.

HOME SCREEN, LANGUAGE & MESSAGING
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The ‘My Health’ area interacted with some key features of the app that we would’ve loved to explore more if we had more time. The homepage, the use of language and where and when to offer the messaging function were all interactions that needed further development and exploration.

Thanks to...
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Product Design Lead
Abby Bainbridge-Welch

Tend Capstone Team
Alice, Lin, Gray & Amelia

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