Tina Claussen
UX/UI Designer
NeuroConnect+
app design
Overview
Project
Broadly, this project focused on a healthcare app. We decided to design an app that helps neurodiverse individuals connect and communicate with physicians. Since this app was designed from scratch, not only did we design the app features, but we constructed a design system as well. Our design had the following features:
​
-
Home page
-
User profile
-
Appointment scheduler
-
Symptom tracker
-
Search page
-
Splash screen
-
Sign in/sign up feature
Role
Except for small individual tasks, we designed the majority of the app as a team rather than individually or in small groups. However, since I was coming to the project with fresh eyes, I was able to give some perspective to some aspects of the app that we were then able to re-design or add before we went to usability testing. This allowed us to have better results in the usability testing that we might have otherwise.
Key Drivers
Neurodiverse individuals often struggle to receive healthcare and manage health decisions for themselves and their families. The features in this app are designed to help a neurodiverse individual manage appointments, keep track of prescriptions, track symptoms to make communicating with a doctor easier and help finding doctors who have knowledge of how to treat and manage the case of someone who is neurodiverse. While the app is aimed particularly at neurodiverse individuals, we found that non-neurodiverse individuals also had interest in the app.
Research
I joined this team just after the research part of the process. I started this project with team Greenleaf, and after we finished the mid-fidelity wireframes, instructors moved some individuals to new teams to give them different experiences and to best leverage the strengths of individual team members.
Tools
Maze, Figma
Usability testing
Summary
We conducted remote usability testing through the Maze app/website. This proved challenging for several reasons.
​
-
We had a limit to the number of questions we were allowed to ask, which meant we missed out on qualitative feedback
-
The test was set up and tested on a desktop platform. However, we didn’t discover until after the test went live that there were issues with the mobile version. We know this affected the number of users and it also meant there was some guesswork involved with deciphering the results.
-
The test worked differently on Mac vs. Windows/Android devices, which also affected our results.
Results
We had a total of 14 responses. This was a good result, but not as good as we intended due to the problems with the mobile version of the test. Here are the key takeaways from the testing:
​
-
The app provided a clear user experience - 50-70% of users completed the app in a timely fashion and with a limited number of mis-clicks.
-
The squares on the calendar may be too small. Question #1 (try to schedule an appointment on September 28) had an average of 9.3 misclicks. Some of these may be attributable to the technical issues we had getting Maze to work on mobile, but this error seemed to be consistent across most users regardless of platform.
-
Eight of our users (57%) reported that a symptom tracking feature would help them remember when symptoms started and improve their communication with their provider
-
Users had higher success rates during the appointment scheduling task (70%) than the symptom reporting task (50%)
-
Users were asked to rate on a scale of 1-10 (1=not efficient at all, 10=very efficient) how efficient it was to schedule an appointment through the app. The average rating was 9.1.
-
While 50% of users completed the symptom recording task, 25% did so via an indirect method
Logo, typography and color
Logo
The logo was truly a team effort, with each team member contributing something to the design of the logo. We went through many versions of the logo, some of which are represented below. We finally landed on the light blue infinity symbol for connection, and the logotype in darker blue and orange.
Typography
The typography was also a team effort, but we chose a pair of sans serif typefaces as we wanted the app to be soothing as many neurodiverse patients have a great deal of anxiety surrounding doctors and medical procedures.
Color palette
In a similar vein, the color palette uses calm pastel tones in blue and orange. Blues and greens are also often used in the medical profession and oranges signify warmth, comfort or happiness, all emotions we are trying to summon in our users.
.png)
Deliverables-
Hi fidelity wireframes
Learning opportunities
There were a number of learning opportunities with this project:
-
Coming into a team midway through a project and learning to coming up to speed quickly.
-
Learning to work under an already established team workflow.
-
Working with limitations in the Maze app and learning how to best minimize those issues in future testing opportunities.
-
Designing an app with no competitors in the market.
Takeaways and next steps
-
We learned a great deal about testing, where it fits in the process, and how to better set it up in the future to ensure technical limitations don’t interfere with research results.
-
We felt like we came away with a functional app that likely needs some more features, like a pain scale before it would be ready to send out for coding and final testing.
-
While we did do some prototyping, we were not able to get a full working prototype in the time we were allotted. This would have been the next immediate step before moving on to handoff and coding.
.png)
