UX Case study: Doctor’s appointment booking app

Doctor Easy — Case study

1. INTRODUCTION

The Healthcare industry is growing at an exponential rate since the outbreak of COVID -19 and technological development is accelerating the transformation of the healthcare industry. But sometimes, getting a doctor’s appointment, waiting in a long queue in a doctors’ clinic can make us frustrated. With technology reaching our hands in the form of mobile phones, tablets, it will also be easier and convenient if everybody is able to consult doctors online. As a part of Google’s UX Design Professional Certification, I took this project and designed a Doctor’s appointment booking app to overcome these challenges.

2. PROBLEM STATEMENT

In this project, I have taken two groups of users: Doctors and Patients. Doctors face a challenge in managing their appointments and patients struggle to reach doctors and also wait in longer queues.

This app will help anyone to book an appointment instantly. Patients can search for the right doctor by speciality, symptoms, location, check doctor’s available time slots and book instantly avoiding the need to wait in longer queues, making it easier and faster to reach doctors. They can also avail text checkups and online video consultation. Doctors can also manage their appointments and save time.

3. ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

I was the sole UX/UI designer in this project.

Responsibilities: User Research (Interviews, Personas), Secondary Research (Competitor Analysis), Ideation and Storyboarding, Wireframing and Prototyping, High Fidelity Design and Testing (Usability Study)

Duration: 2 months (December 2021-January 2022)

4. DESIGN PROCESS

I followed the concept of Design Thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

Outline of my design process

5. RESEARCH

User Interview (Doctor flow): I interviewed 4 people for doctor’s flow.

Participant characteristics:

• 2 of them are professional doctors with an experience of 15 years.
• 2 of them are recent medical college graduates who have started practicing medicine. I chose recent graduates to understand the needs of doctors who have started practicing recently.

I asked the following questions to Doctors:

• Are you a registered doctor in any other appointment booking app?
• If yes, what are the challenges that you face in the app?
• How are you able to manage your appointments?
• What are some of the things that you like about the current process?
• What features do you think are most important in such kind of apps?

User Interview (Patient flow): I interviewed 3 people for patient’s flow.

Participant characteristics:

• one who is a mother of an infant.
• one in late 40’s .
• one who was having elderly parents at home.

I asked the following questions to Patients:

• What are the difficulties that you face when you want to book an appointment with a doctor?
• Do you prefer in-clinic visit or online consultation?
• What are the features do you think are important in such kind of apps?
• What are the features that you admire in the current process?

User personas

I created two personas based on user research and interviews: one for Doctor and one for Patient.

Doctor Persona

Patient Persona

Pain points (Patient)

• Patients find it difficult to find a good doctor or hospital.
• Patients who are busy with their work find it hard to book an appointment instantly.
• Need to wait in longer queues.
• Sometimes when they are not able to commute for some reason, they are not able to consult doctors online.
• Instant video calling and text check ups to a doctor is not available.
• Patients are not able to search for doctors symptoms wise.

Pain points (Doctor)

• Doctors find it difficult to manage their appointments.
• In case of emergency, doctors find it difficult to cancel the appointment scheduled at that particular time.
• Also they are not able to customize their clinic timings.

6. COMPETITIVE AUDIT

For competitive audit, I chose Practo and DocOnline and compared the most important features which helped me to gain market knowledge.

Competitive Audit

7. STORYBOARDING

Storyboard of a user trying to book a doctor’s appointment

8. DESIGN

User flow (to-be)

User flow for Patient appointment booking

9. LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

I designed a low fidelity wireframe for both Doctor and patient flow using Figma.

Wireframe for Doctor flow

Wireframe for Patient Flow

Wireframe for Patient Flow

10. USABILITY STUDY

After building a low fidelity prototype, I conducted a moderated usability study with 4 participants: 2 user each for Doctor and Patient Flow.

Pain points identified and improvements

Improvements

• Users didn’t have the option to save the profile of any doctor (Patient flow): When patients feel that when a doctor is good and have the best ratings and feedback, they didn’t have an option to save the doctor profile for future use. This issue was fixed by adding a Bookmark option in all of the doctor profile so that users can Bookmark and these bookmarked profiles can be viewed in a separate section under the navigation menu.
• Users wanted to filter the doctors by Rating (Patient flow): From the list of doctors appearing when patients searched a doctor by symptom or speciality, they didn’t have the option to filter by ratings. Most users found it difficult to scroll the list of doctors. This issue was resolved by adding a “Filter by ratings” option so that users can filter the top rated doctors.
• Doctors preferred a Recurring All feature (Doctor flow): Doctors found it frustrating to customize the calendar everyday. This was improved by adding a “Recurring on All Days” toggle button so that the same timings and slots can be applied for all the days.

11. HIGH FIDELITY MOCKUPS

Here I present the final design of my project.

Sign In/Sign Up screens

A collection High fidelity mockups for Doctor side flow

A Collection of High fidelity mockups for Patient side flow

12. KEY FEATURES (For Doctors)

• TOGGLE ON/OFF ONLINE CONSULTATION: The online consultation feature(Text checkup and Video consultation) has been designed in a doctor friendly way so that it can be enabled or disabled as required by the doctors.
• DOCTOR FRIENDLY APPOINTMENT SLOTS: The appointment slots and the clinic timings are customizable by the doctors. Doctors can also set per slot timings. Toggle on/off button for Morning, Afternoon and Evening slots. This feature can really help doctors to manage their appointments and save time.
• RECURRING ON ALL DAYS: I have designed a toggle button for recurring on All days. This feature if toggled on sets the appointment slots and clinic timings recurring for all days.
• INSTANT APPOINTMENT CANCELLATION: In case of any emergency for Doctors, they can cancel the appointment for any particular slot by clicking the Cancel All button.
• PATIENT HISTORY PRIOR TO CONSULTATION: Doctors are provided with a brief description about Symptoms and complications of the patients even before attending the appointment.
• VIEW PATIENT FEEDBACK AND RATINGS: Doctors can view the ratings and feedback provided by the Patients.
• INSTANT NOTIFICATION ON CANCELLATION BY PATIENTS: If any patient cancels any appointment, the doctors will receive a SMS notification.

13. KEY FEATURES (For Patients)

• SCHEDULING AT FEW TAPS: Users can schedule an appointment instantly in just a few taps.
• SEARCH FOR DOCTOR BY SPECIALITY, SYMPTOM, LOCATION: Users can search for a doctor either by speciality or by symptom or by location.
• CLEAR AND DETAILED DOCTOR PROFILE: The users are able to view the Doctor’s complete profile with information like Years of experience, Specialization, Location, rating, feedbacks received and consultation fees.
• INTEGRATED PAYMENT SYSTEM: Patients can pay the consultation fees through the app while booking. In case of cancellation, they will be refunded.
• BOOKMARKING FEATURE: Patients can bookmark any doctor and can view them in a separate Bookmarks section.
• TEXT CHECKUP AND VIDEO CONSULTATION ON SUBSCRIPTION BASIS: Users can avail text checkups and video consultation at a minimal subscription rate. They are provided with subscription for 1 month, 3 month and 6 month package.
• VIDEO CALL WAITING TIME: For patients who are searching for video consultation, the waiting time for them on any particular doctor is also mentioned.
• RESCHEDULE OR CANCEL APPOINTMENT INSTANTLY: User can Cancel or Reschedule their appointment instantly.
• RATING SYSTEM: After each appointment has been completed, the users will receive a notification on the home page to provide feedback for the doctor.
• INSTANT NOTIFICATION ON CANCELLATION BY DOCTORS: If any doctor cancels their appointment, the users will receive a SMS notification.

14. OUTCOME

This project was really a great learning experience for me from conducting interviews, doing secondary research, competitive analysis and building personas, storyboards based on the interviews, wireframing and prototyping. The biggest challenge for me was to research and design a flow for both sides of users: Doctors and Patients. This app has been successfully designed to solve the problems of both Doctors and Patients. Patients no longer have to be worried about the wait times in clinic. They can plan their daily schedule better. And doctors can save a lot of time by managing their appointments.

15. NEXT STEPS

If I were to iterate on the current design, I would focus on the following issues:

• E-Prescriptions: Doctors are able to provide prescriptions through the app and patients are able to review them.
• Medical records: Patients are able to upload their diagnostic scan reports so that the physicians can view them.
• Online delivery of medicines: Ordering medicines through this app and getting delivered at door step.

THANK YOU FOR READING!!