PROBLEM
Doctory is in the business of providing healthcare triage to Pakistani citizens, where there are nearly 20 regional languages and dozens of dialects. S Knowing this isn't a problem that's confined to Pakistan, Doctory would like to explore innovative ways to help people communicate about health without dependency on spoken language. I was tasked with
SOLUTION
I was challenged with validating the problem of language barriers between doctors and patients, charting the product's next steps, and addressing these learnings in mobile prototype.
MY ROLE
User Research - Prototyping
TIMEFRAME
1 week
KEY METHODS & TOOLS
User Research, Research Synthesis, Sketching, Wireframes, Wire flows, User flows, Rapid Prototyping, Low-fidelity Clickable Prototyping
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Overview
Ask patients how they feel about their medical care experiences and they seemed to say similar things: I don’t feel heard. I don’t feel that I can trust my doctor. I avoid doctors at all costs.
This got me thinking: what’s the difference between a patient who can’t seek care because of a language barrier, versus a patient who doesn’t seek care because of the fear of an understanding barrier? Can one solution solve both problems? Is a language barrier purely based on different languages, or could it also be based on lack of information or use of medical jargon?
I pivoted from my initial path of building a solution purely for language barriers. Instead, I wondered, could medical care become what we all want it to be? Doctors who actually listen to patients, can translate their considerable expertise into understandable terms, and who are motivated to partner with patients to make the right decisions together. And could tech be part of the solution to this?
Goals
I outlined my goals, aiding to create research questions to better understand patients:
User Research
I recruited users who’ve faced language barriers firsthand: the majority of which have lived in a country that spoke a foreign language. My aim was to understand how they’ve conquered language barriers more complex than standard tourism experiences. To round out the group, I chose a variety of users of different ages and balanced out genders.
High level breakdown of user research participants.
The focus of the interview questions were around the following themes for patients:
- Getting treatment and finding the right medical care
- Understanding a medical diagnosis and treatment details
- Being able to ask questions to get the right information to make an informed decision
- Experience with language barriers and difficulty communicating in a country in a foreign language
FINAL RESEARCH FINDINGS
After the interviews, while synthesizing the research, it became clear that communication is poor between doctors and patients even when they both speak the same language. Patients seem to universally not feel heard, understood, or well taken care of.
You can fix the language issue, and you still won’t be fixing the “communication” issue. I made the decision to pivot away from the Doctory mission of helping patients in Pakistan to follow this thread, and craft a solution that hit closer to home and addressed the painpoints of my participant group.
USER FLOWS
Drafting user flows unveiled the system for this new medical product, while being agnostic to the exact UI. It became clear that the app needed a few different capabilities.
A few rounds of user flows lead to the key app pages: symptom search, doctor search, appointment scheduling, ability to join a virtual appointment, the post-appointment summary, and a message portal.
PAPER PROTOTYPES
Seeing as there were a myriad of concepts at play that were yet to be tested, creating a paper prototype and putting them in front of users was crucial to the design process.
There still had to be more thinking done about the “matching” of patients to doctors, and how to solve the relationship part of the problem. That was later built in the clickable prototypes.
CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE
Incorporating feedback from Paper Prototyping, I created an interactive, clickable prototype using Balsamiq.
Screenshot of the Balsamiq prototype, v1.
Through rapid user testing, it became clear that there was a final level of simplification needed in the app. The homepage wasn’t intuitive, the first run experience felt long, and the concept of choosing a primary care physician didn’t quite come through. After a few iterations, I was able to land on a v1 proof of concept prototype.
Introducing, MyDoc
Introducing MyDoc. Find a doctor near you, or a virtual doctor, who understands you. Understand your body while understanding the severity of your symptoms without having to see the doctor. Know your primary care physician is just a message away, and can direct you to a specialist if it’s needed. Feel comfortable asking questions, whenever.
Next Steps
To further prove the concepts in MyDoc, effort will be needed for a more refined visual concept to choose a primary care physician. It seems that there is an opportunity in matching patients with their perfect doctor. What could that look like? Maybe a more Tinder-like process for submitting doctor preferences, and being able to virtual meet and mingle with potential Primary Care candidates.
Another interesting investigation would be seeing if/how the MyDoc app would impact doctors and their quality of care. Building a marketplace for patients where doctors are encouraged to be great may actually help doctors prioritize time with patients and bedside manner. Our current US systems does not seem to have the right incentives in place to encourage this behavior from doctors.
Before any additional prototype time is spent, here is a list of questions to validate:
- What doctors would be interested in this platform?
- How can we encourage highly rated doctors to accept MyDoc appointments?
- How many doctors would be open to virtual appointments?
- Viable globally? What is potential for this app in other markets?
FINAL TAKEAWAYS
Global healthcare and understanding medical care is a mammoth issue. As much as I wish we could create a solution to solve it all, it’s not realistic — but we need to start chipping away to make progress.
MyDoc is built around a core of understanding: how can we ensure doctors can provide the time and care that patients need. I focused on tactical features aimed at being inclusive to individuals of all languages and literacy levels.
How can we expect people of different languages to understand each other, when some can’t even understand those speaking the same language?