Interaction Alliance Healthcare Portal
The Interaction Alliance (IA) Healthcare Portal application was designed for my HCI 440 class at DePaul University. It aims to create a smoother, less intrusive process for caregivers, from managing healthcare data to scheduling appointments.
Skills
User research, Human-centered design, Usability studies, Figma, PowerPoint, Collaboration
To start this project, we conducted semi-structured contextual interviews with individuals who use healthcare applications to schedule appointments. I interviewed two individuals who work as healthcare professionals. From these initial interviews, we identified a few key user groups and pain points:
- Parents with kids who use mobile patient portals and phone calls to schedule appointments for themselves and kids. The scheduling process for this kind of user often took longer and required more information, sometimes causing users to call the office instead. Managing appointments also often required switching accounts and re-entering lots of information.
2. Health services professionals who work as a clinician and as a supervisor. These users handle scheduling for clinicians, including themselves, using Epic software. While there were some snags with the scheduling system, this user type navigated the systems efficiently and confidently.
3. Tech-proficient individuals who utilize mobile patient portals to schedule appointments for themselves. Due to tech proficiency, this user type found it relatively easy and simple to schedule these appointments. However, their patient portals sometimes offer conflicting or confusing information.
We used these findings as a “jumping off” point to brainstorm our first wireframes. Several wireframes had common features we decided to keep in our next design iterations:
- Linked profiles: The app allows users to view the profiles of their family members and switch between them easily using a dropdown menu.
- Multi-scheduling: The app allows users to schedule multiple appointments at a time for multiple family members without starting over for each appointment.
- Shared calendar view: The app allows users to view the appointment schedules of each of their family members.
I created a few early wireframes to help guide our direction, shown on the right.
For our low-fidelity prototype, we decided to focus on the dashboard and profile switching, multi-appointment scheduling, provider selection and filtering, and date/time selection. I created the provider selection and filtering section, as well as helped other team members refine their designs.
The next step was to conduct usability tests with participants. We created interactive prototypes in Google Slides or PowerPoint, with each slide representing a different system state. I conducted one usability test personally.
From these usability tests, we identified a few key usability problems.
- Users had difficulty identifying where to begin multi-profile scheduling
- Multi-profile selection did not clearly communicate the required sequence (select profiles, then proceed)
- Provider filtering caused friction and input loss during filtering
- Participants had difficulty locating detailed profile information
- Participants had difficulty remembering and selecting a time that would not create a scheduling conflict.
We updated our designs to add color highlighting, change labeling to be clearer, send notifications when system actions were completed, and visually show users scheduling conflicts. These updates aimed to reduce confusion, increase visual clarity, show next steps more obviously, and reduce cognitive load.
What’s Next?
While HCI 440 may be over, the journey to ensure usable, accessible design is not. I will be sure to carry the teachings from this course and this project in my future work in order to create systems that are human friendly.
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