doctolib
Duration
2 weeks
Team
The Design Crew Product Design
Role
User Research, UI Design, UX Design, UX Writing
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Google Doc & co.
2 weeks
The Design Crew Product Design
User Research, UI Design, UX Design, UX Writing
Figma, FigJam, Google Doc & co.
Doctolib is a French company that operates an online platform for booking and managing medical appointment.
The platform allows healthcare professionals to manage their appointments and patient records.
It also allows patients to take appointments online with practitioners such as doctors, therapists, dentists and other healthcare professionals referenced on the platform.
The design team of Doctolib presented their case by giving us key words, resources and other points to check so we could have a clear perception on their product and objectives. But the key subject of 2022 is : relationships and interactions patient X practitioner. The idea is to propel internal interactions between those two actors.
The right solution should allow...
to facilitate and optimize the planning of the appointment (for the patient and the practitioner)
to facilitate and optimize everything coming next post-appointment (tracking additional information)
to increase information and document sharing through the platform
Because of the specificity of the subject, touching sensitive points such as healthcare and confidentiality, we decided to benchmark competitors.
The goal was to have a first idea on how they treated the subject, what kind of services they offer, how they were promoting it... Actually, we wanted to understand what user needs they were trying to resolve.
Based on our previous benchmark, we defined some learning goals to build our interviews for user research. So we focused on understanding :
when, how and for what reasons, the patient and pratictioner interact together
the patient experience (expectations, needs, issues) with the practitioner throught the interface
Once our learning goals and questions were prepared, we then interviewed 4 people (2F, 2M) from 25 to 54, about their relationship to health.
And we’ve identified 6 main subjects that brought to light different conversations and some frictional points :
The practioner’s judgement
The wrong or missing diagnosis
The lack of advices and support
Digitization of documents
Missing elements
Time optimization
First of all, we learned that the doctor's lack of time directly impacts the relationship with their patient. Patients often felt rushed and left alone in their healthcare pathway. And most of the time, patients are tired of repeating themselves when they're seeing several specialists to get a diagnosis.
In addition, our interviews revealed that patients frequently collected various documents during their appointment : classic paper documents, post-it, pdf, CD-Rom...
Wether they're regular patients or not, the amount of documents can increase drastically. However, we discovered that organizing a medical record wasn't necessarily a habit for everyone. So any document could easily be lost by the patient. Not to mention, practitioners can forget to give documents, or they can also share documents that turn out unreadable by other peers.
According to Doctolib's data about their personas, 2 subjects were highlighted as opportunities. We found out that working on the lack of advices and support, and digitization of documents could respond to users’ needs.
We noticed one significant thing, all of our interviewers couldn’t remember their own medical history and they were kind of “rediscovering” it through the interview.
With all those learnings we immediately ideate, made a mindmap and developed some ideas in a crazy 8s.
Then, one childhood memory came to our mind : le carnet de santé, also known as health record ! The Carnet de santé / Health record is a booklet where parents can keep track of all their children's health information.
It is given to them the day of their child’s birth, so we all have memories of our “Carnet de santé” which was an essential tool for us.
We realized that we lost sight of this booklet as we grew older, and we didn't have any equivalency of this object as adults.
The affordance of this concept and object was very interesting to exploit, our goal was clear.
Indeed, the first few minutes of Q&A between a practitioner and a patient, consist in making a general health-check with basic informations like : name, age, weight, height, allergies, medical history, family history, tobacco and alcohol use etc...
So we were aiming to build a solution where the patient could upstream preparation for their appointment. We wanted to allow them to complete their medical informations and stock all documents health-related easily.
Besides allowing storage for medical history and other documents, we wanted to propose a sharing feature for the patient.
The patient should have the possibility to share informations and documents with the next practitioner, in the limits of what they want to keep confidential.
As a means to enhance the quality time of an appointment, we chose to create a solution that would save time for both parties.
In order to integrate all those new features in line with our concept idea, we created a new page called "Carnet de santé", which is accessible in the navigation bar. This page is composed of 3 sections to organize your medical record and healthcare pathway
Medical informations : the patient user can make their own "medical profile" by filling basic informations such as weight, height, allergies... To save some time for the actual appointment and eventually present their issue with adequate elements, they can choose to share specific informations before any appointment.
Documents : this page already exists in Doctolib, both patient and practitioner can drop documents in that space. As a way to encourage interactions in that space (storing and sharing documents) we'll add filters to facilitate research.
Notes : considering the variety of documents, recommandations, contacts, advices, instructions, that a patient can get during an appointment, this section should support the patient in the tracking of their healthcare pathway. It could be the perfect tool to prepare questions pre-appointment and gather all informations post-appointment.
The carnet de santé solution should allow to increase interactions on the platform because the patient can easily organize and storage all health-related element in these 3 sections. They can also choose to share some medical informations, or documents with their practitioner pre-appointment. A new primary call-to-action to share medical informations would appear on "My appointments" page for any appointment to come.
With this new feature, both practitioners and patients users could gain time for their appointments.
To sum up, our objective is to encourage patients to fill their medical informations, upload documents and share adequate elements for the next appointment to come.
Because Doctolib sends an automatic email, the day before the appointment, we thought it would be the right moment to encourage the user to prepare their appointment upstream. So we believed that the most logical entry-level would occur with this email notification and decided to include two buttons to "Complete my Carnet de santé" and "Share my Carnet de santé".
Above that, we didn't skimp on opportunities and worked furthermore on discoverability by adding others call-to-action on the homepage and on "My account" page.
For the user tests we made a simple scenario, in which the patient user has to fulfill 2 main tasks. They booked an appointment for a second advice, with a doctor who was recommended by a friend.
We tested this first prototype with 5 users, 2 women and 3 men from 24 to 36 years old.
And they revealed certain great points such as...
users thought the health record (Carnet de santé) was an interesting feature
users appreciated the sharing feature of medical informations
users appreciated the filter options of the page “My documents”
"It’s quite interesting because i can save time during consultation. The good thing is that I can share elements that I have completed or not. I understand the logic actually..."
Quentin, 28 yo, about medical informations
“There’s literally everything, weight, age, vaccine, we can find everything here. So the doctor can have access to my complete medical history.
Amandine, 36 yo, about medical informations
But some pain points still remained, so we identified what elements needed to be redesigned
users were confused about the usefulness of the button “Add an element” in the page “Carnet de santé”
users were confused by the structure of the page “Medical informations"
users were confused by the wording “Mes informations médicales”
users were confused by the button “Share a document” appearing twice on the same page “My appointments”
“When I see “medical informations” first thing I think about is my social security number (carte vitale)”
Amandine, 36 yo
We learned the hard way that the entry-level wasn't the best path to introduce a new feature because at the question "What do you do when you receive this email ?" One said...
"Well nothing." *heavy silence*
"I’ll check the detail, but besides that I check the address last minute to be sure, but well...”
Sami, 24 yo, about the mail notification
users didn’t interact with the email
With this user testing we learned that the affordance of the Carnet de santé was very high because users understood quickly its purpose.
They found the concept of an online health record really interesting and the ability to share informations and documents very practical.
However, the scenario wasn’t set in the right time of the process to incite the patient to use all different kind of call-to-action.
Besides, the wording and structure overall confused the user. Even though several opportunities were set, the flow was misleading for the user.
Thus the solution in itself was well received, we needed to work on its discoverability, on the global UX Writing and make some adjustments on the UI part.
With that in mind, here's how we upgraded the second version of the prototype.
We chose a new type of flow to introduce the solution to the patient user.
This time, the patient needs to actually book an appointment with a new practitioner. In this case, we added in the end of this process a call-to-action "Complete my carnet de santé" (on the right) along with a message encouraging the patient to use these new features :
"Think about completing your health book
It's your first time consulting this practitioner : facilitate the diagnosis and save time by sharing with them all necessary elements before your consultation."
We worked on the structure of the page so the UI seems a bit more harmonized. Therefore interactions would be more intuitive.
We balanced the upper parts so that they were aligned. We chose to invert the cards so the information card on how to use the feature stood out more.
As you can see, an effort was made on the UX Writing. First, we changed the term "Medical informations" to "Medical profile" so it would be less confusing.
Also, we enhanced the card about the solution by explaining more precisely its purpose :
"Your health tracking ready to hand
Fill your medical profile so you don't forget anything.
Share any information you want before each consultation.
Update your medical profile at anytime."
Minor changes on the wording were made to be more consistent. Instead of "Share your health book" we corrected to "Share your medical profile".
Here, we attached a label for the research button, positioned the filters in line with their category and added a pagination.
We'd like to check several things on the practitioner side such as : how would they manage the reception of documents in D-2 or more ? In which format would they receive the medical profile ? Is it useful for them ? Would they really save a little bit time and manage to enhance the quality of the appointment ?
Of course we also thought that it would be interesting to work on the structure of the email, or even make a full redesign to tickle the curiosity of the patient and incite them to take action.
Unfortunately, by lack of time we weren't able to develop the notes section. We voluntarily chose to deprioritize it because we knew we couldn't test all the features in such a short time. However, users were very much intringued by it and wanted to explore it.
Besides, the design team of Doctolib shared pretty much similar feelings on this subject and actually adopted the feature in their current product !
