UX Case Study- App for booking appointment with a doctor
Doctaro is a mobile app which aims to help people find best doctors and book appointment more quickly and seamlessly.
Problem statement
To create an experience that allows people to connect with their best doctors in their locality. Creating an improved experience for booking appointment with the doctor digitally.
Research
- Survey
Since Healthcare is a very wide topic, I first conducted open ended survey followed by close ended survey. I created a survey with 10 users.
The problems in the queue system exist so to get a deep idea about the same, I conducted a survey on it. Insights I got from my survey on queue system:
Average time a patient spends in the waiting queue was 40 mins.
2. Interviews
To get some qualitative insights on problems with using the Internet for finding best doctor I ran interviews focusing on user’s needs. In order to understand what the users want I conducted 10 user interviews.
User Analysis
From user analysis, a few pain points that I came across are as follows:
Waiting time for doctor’s too long.
Finding all information online about doctor and clinic is hard.
There were good examples of online booking solutions. But due to difficulty in finding all information online, patients also prefer discussing appointment over the phone to get into the office of a trusted doctor and adapting to the specialists available slots.
Users first seek suggestions from friends and families. Checks online who rated or referred the doctor and views rating of both doctor and clinic.
People face issue in finding out time according to the doctor schedule and would like to get an appointment from a good doctor in their free time.
People living outside hometown face more issue in finding doctor for lack of recommendation, less ideas and also face language issues with doctor.
When deliberating the price of the service, patients validate the value they get in return for their money: they check ratings, doctor profiles, pictures showcasing the office hygiene.
Rescheduling appointment to another time is hard.
Competitive analysis
I did the competitive analysis based on the important features which helped me to gain market knowledge. Doing this analysis gave me the scope of my product.
User personas
After analyzing the interviews I consolidated the insights and developed a persona, in which I have captured the user’s key goal and frustrations that my design should ultimately tackle.
Ideation
For representing my data I used the Moscow diagram:
Ultimately the app can show its strength when
- patients want to browse wide selection of available appointments of doctors they know and want to book
- new doctors and clinics need to be searched in a trusted and easy way
- users maintain appointments and reminders of appointment and keep track of their daily routines using their mobile. And also get live updates about their appointment.
I thought about the way people typically book appointments — they are generally flexible. Someone would think: “I’m free between 1 and 3, and if it’s a good doctor I could maybe cancel my work at 4 and see the doctor instead”, and so on. I decided to make the booking process reflect that.
I wanted the main focus of the app to revolve around booking an appointment. This was the primary feature of the product — I wanted to make sure the core point was clear.
There were two tricky part :
- To define the flow for booking an appointment. There were two ways of doing it -
- Choosing a doctor first and then choosing a time slot
- Choosing a time slot first and then the doctor
I conducted another survey with 15 users to understand which factor influenced the decision making most while booking. 71% of people prioritized selecting a doctor first and then booking a slot . So I decided to go with option 1.
- While searching for doctor patient should search by doctor or clinic. Since in my interviews some of the users also wanted to get clinic reviews, hygiene details. So I decided to give this choice to the users itself by creating tabs and giving the users their freedom to choose of how they want to search best doctors around them.
User Flow
The most important motive of the app was to provide an easy way for patients to book appointments.
Wireframes
Low fidelity screens
High Fidelity Screens
Testing and Iterating
I tested the my initial high fidelity prototype with 5 users. The users had to perform 2 tasks-
- Book an appointment with a particular doctor within a particular slot.
- Cancelling the appointment.
Users were able to perform all tasks but had trouble in booking appointment for a different patient using their own account since by default the app booked appointment for the user who’s account has been logged-in. So I decided to include another screen to mention patient’s name and contact details just before confirming appointment.
Final Screen
I went ahead to make the final screens choosing blue as the primary color since blue is heavily associated with calmness and it symbolizes serenity, stability, inspiration, wisdom or health.
I chose a strong blue color to convey knowledge, trustworthiness, reliability, and confidence. I also made the color relatively bright and saturated to evoke a sense of freshness and modernity.
ONBOARDING
- Walkthrough to showcase major features of the app.
LOGIN & SIGN-UP TO APP
- Login and sign-up credentials provided by the users.
- Accessing location at the time of log-in/sign-up to provide best doctors in nearby location.
HOMESCREEN STATES
- Just after booking an appointment the blue card comes in the home-screen which shows recently booked appointment.
- Soon it will disappear and all the upcoming booked appointment can be seen in the appointment page.
BOOKING AN APPOINTMENT
- Select symptom from home-screen.
- Either search by clinic or search by doctor.
- Apply your required filters while searching.
- Select your preferred doctor.
- Check out the rating, reviews, clinic images(if searching by clinic), about the doctor and consultation price.
- Select time slot as per your convenience.
- I took into consideration language filter because of the communication issues people face when they come from different hometown.
CANCELLING AN APPOINTMENT
- Appointment options available in kebab menu.
- Edit/cancel your appointment.
- You can edit/cancel just after booking in the home-screen or you can do it later by going to the appointment page.
- Clicking on appointments bring you list of all the upcoming booked appointments. From there you can edit/cancel any appointment.
- Edit appointment brings you back the booking flow with the current booked options unavailable.
- Cancelling it just after booking in home screen.
2. Cancelling from appointment page.
PREVIOUS APPOINTMENT DETAILS
- Clicking on visited doctors brings up the list of all doctors you have visited.
- By clicking on any of the doctor you can view the prescription with dosage.
- The prescription gets updated as soon as you visit the doctor.
- You can also re-book appointment with the doctor by clicking on RE-BOOK button and then selecting your convenient appointment time as in the booking flow.
APP NOTIFICATIONS
- Get auto reminder and live updates on your booked appointments.
As a future scope of the app the help button in the navigation will open up tele-chat with doctor or clinic staff or app-maintainers where users can ask their queries. They can also view FAQs.
Learnings
User analysis importance:
I had made a few assumptions about the problems faced by patients. But due to survey and interviews , most of the assumptions were validated and at the same time, I discovered more pain points to be solved. Surveys and interviews increased the scope of my knowledge and the data gathered in the process was helpful in making user informed choices while creating the user flow.
Conclusion
In today’s digital world, private practices, hospitals and clinics continue to improve the patient experience using sophisticated and easy-to-use software solutions. Implementing a medical appointment scheduling system will help to improve workflow efficiency, capture more patients and remain competitive in the healthcare market. It’s a great alternative to queue system and appointment on call system.
Doctaro app will provide an easy and effective experience for connecting with best doctors nearby. Not only can it provide patients with self-scheduling options, but it will also send automatic reminders to never miss the upcoming appointments.
