Challange & selection

I work in a Software Solutions company as a Lead Marketeer of the Health Product we offer. We knew we  had to up our game as company and provide or clients (Hospitals) with a mobile app (Personal Health  Record) that helped them connect with their clients (patients). The challenge was that this app should be  sufficiently attractive to the patients as in “cool and modern” but also be safe and professional, patients  should find the info they were looking for and use it to find the hospitals offer in healthcare such as doctors  attending there and specialty branches. Also it had to be formal and reliable app since it was going to carry  the hospitals logo and hold the patient’s sensitive information (lab results and previous appointments),  we really had to know what the users would want to see in it in order to be compelled to download it and  give a hospital an app that they could be comfortable with to put their brand on it.

Feature wise we knew what a PHR had to have and the requirements from our clients, but we did have to  look into the users. First my team and I (Marketing collaborators in the Marketing Department of the  company) decided we needed to interact with the target beneficiaries of the app so we went to hospitals  to identify the potential users, this would help to form the personas used in the UX execution of the design  and see if we could invite them to our mind mapping (my chosen tool) event.

We identified these users and developed personas from them:

1. Futures moms  2. Chronic patients  3. Caretakers of the chronic patients  4. Parents to small children looking for specialty doctors or choosing the family doctor  5. Physical therapy (post operation or accidental)

Application

After pairing up with our Beta Client (hospital that wanted to be our Beta in order to help us develop the  app and obtain financial benefits when it was finished) we developed a way to lure our target patients  exchanging discount on future doctor’s appointments in exchange of their time to participate in our  investigation.

For the activity, we engaged the participants in two different activities:

1st we used the ethnographic method for them to answer: How was the experience for them to choose a  hospital and a doctor when they were looking for healthcare services? We had our team, one UX  developer and the software developer take notes; even the PR person from the hospital was invited to  listen in on the participants input.

On a 2nd activity we developed a mind mapping scenery where we generated different “sections” of things  they could see in an app represented with photos:

  Buying goods while in the hospital

  Charged services

  Billing services

  Catered services

  Food related services

  Accessing doctors

  Doctors related information

  Accessing their medical info (history)

  Mobile app expected features

  Choosing facilities specifications

  Extra (wishful thinking)

For Personas development and Interviews we used the methodology suggested in the book DESIGN  THINKING BUSINESS INNOVATION by: MAURICIO VIANNA, YSMAR VIANNA, ISABEL ADLER, BRENDA  LUCENA, BEATRIZ RUSSO)

Insight & Approach

What I learned from conducting this exercise was really exciting. We as a team learned a lot from the  different ways people look for healthcare, we discovered that a lot of them (especially pregnant women)  “shop around” in different hospitals budgeting certain parts of their experience and not negotiating  others. Patients today really do “shop around” for a doctor using worth of mouth, recommendations, and  checking “trashing sites” where people go to exhibit bad experiences, also they check on the internet  credentials and hospital certifications, specifically here in Monterrey being so close to Texas, they care a  lot if the hospital and their doctors have international certifications and compliance or partnerships with  renowned hospitals in the USA and verify it on the internet.

Based on all of these insight we came up with a huge list of criteria that our app had to comply with, in  order to satisfy what the app users would expect to find in an app and compel them to download it.

I discovered that the most valuable aspect of this experience was seeing how all of this persons are careful  buyers that are informed and that many of the givens we previously had were not even mentioned by our  targeted users. I also think that we had envisioned a good app to put out there before this, but with all  the info gathered from our exercise we will be referencing this experiment many times in the future, and  I now know, we will actually be able to offer the patients a very useful tool for them to check our client’s  hospital. In the same way the hospital is going to have a way to really connect with their patients and  potential customers providing them with a one-one connection and improving their experience with the  hospital at the reach of their palm, by doing so the hospital gets an edge in this highly competed industry.

As for me I will keep using design thinking to innovate since in my industry if you don’t innovate you die.

