Wexel is a mobile app that provides flexibility in medical appointment bookings by alerting caregivers about openings due to last-minute cancellations.
Team.
Bridget Sheffler
John Sykes
Sakshat Goyal
My Roles.
User Research
Interaction Design
Usability Testing
Problem Space:
Premera BlueCross asked our team to explore problems among informal caregivers finding care for their patients. While we assumed it was tough for caregivers to find care for their patients, we found that what caregivers needed was time to meet with the doctors. Long wait times always got in the way of caregivers finding the to take their patients to see a doctor that fit their schedules.
At the same time, we found that the US healthcare industry loses $150B annually due to missed appointments by patients. If a patient cancels his/her appointment on the day of the appointment, there's only a 7% chance that the appointment could be picked up by another patient.
Solution:
We proposed a solution where a canceled appointment could automatically transfer to a person who needed an appointment around the same time.
With our tool, caregivers could set alerts of any appointment openings within one or multiple time frames that best fit their demanding schedules. If an appointment gets canceled, they receive a notification alerting them for the availability.
This process right now is a manual one, and the proposed product would attempt to automate that process, making it easier for patients as well as the hospital staff.
This was the result of an 11-week process of problem-setting, testing, and iterating. But, once we delivered the design,
I decided to spend a little more time refining the design concerns I had based on
For future design iterations, I decided to work with a smaller screen size instead of the iPhone X to get a better perspective for a variety of screen sizes.
Viewing search results; Iteration 3 → Iteration 4.
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I learned that hospitals were too scattered across a city for an everyday user to interpret their distances. This led to redundancy for the map to appear on a user's screen before the list of doctors.
Interactive elements from the doctor's profile page were moved due to ergonomic issues with the previous screen. The concept came from design pattern suggestions by Luke Wroblewski.
Setting up a cancellation alert; Iteration 3 → Iteration 4
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I learned from talking to hospital staff that patients have appointments every 3rd or 4th week. Most of the time, they ask to be alerted about any openings between appointments. Now,
The "confirmed appointments" and the "cancellation alerts" were first separated with tabs, and the patient had to be selected through a drop-down menu.
The current version reduces the need for having the tabs and drop downs, as it was found from feedback that patients are less likely to have more than a couple of confirmed appointments at any given time.
Using Pugh's matrix to evaluate ideas.
Each of the three ideas, when storyboarded, gave us the human-centered experience of what the design might look like in action.
As we moved forward, I proposed the feature that allowed users to set cancellation alerts for specific time frame instead of individual appointments. It was based on insights from our research probes, where we noticed that caregivers have large chunks of continuous-time that they only use to take care of their patients.
We noticed that caregivers have large chunks of time they set aside for their patients. Based on that, I proposed a feature that allowed users to set alerts within a frame of time rather than setting alerts for individual appointment slots.
While prototyping this idea, our focus was on the users’ act of booking an appointment and setting an alert for a possible availability within their desired time frame.
Keypaths of the first Paper Prototypes. (called Mezzo at the time)
There's a lot of freedom in manual sketches. It forms the foundation for ideas to be detailed out in a computer. The layout below is the result of over four iterations on the sketched design on the white wall.
This is my personal assessment of the limitation and opportunities of our project.