Case study: simplify doctors' daily jobs with medical prescriptions
Final project, real client project, health industry, medical prescriptions, information architecture.
For the final project of the 10 weeks Iron Hack Bootcamp, we could choose our team to work on a real client project and I had the pleasure to work with Alexandre Ruban, designer and also web developper. Together we had the opportunity to work for the start-up Ordotype, during two weeks.
Let me introduce you our client.
— THE CLIENT
Ordotype is a french start-up co-founded in 2021 by two practitioners and one engineer. They offer a desktop platform with standard medical prescriptions destinated to general practitioners.
Their goal is to simplify and generalize the medical prescriptions for all the doctors by creating a similar data base that contains all the medical specialities that general practitioners may encounter during their consultations.
They also want to help the doctors to maintain their knowledges updated so they can prescribe the right treatments. By creating a similar data base for the entire medical profession, the patients can all be treated with the same knowledges updated for the pathologies they are concerned.
« We need to simplify doctors’ daily lives and to remove their mental workload. » Ordotype founders.
— THE CHALLENGE
Ordotype realised that their website is not very intuitive and they would need UX.UI Designers to make easier for the general practitioners to use.
Our challenge with Alexandre is to:
- Improving the existing the user flow for general practitioners, in order to help them to find the good prescription easily and faster.
Our main job is focused on the information architecture of the research result of the pathologies.
— KICK-OFF MEETING WITH THE STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEW
WHAT WE LEARNED:
- Their target: On average, General practitioners see 25 patients a day and consultations are short, between 15 and 20 minutes. So they need to use efficient tools.
- General practice: This is where 40% of patients are seen and yet it is the sector where there is the least progress in terms of equipment compared to ophthalmology for example.
- Practitioners have a business software, where they have to type the medical prescriptions for the patients.
« On the actual website the informations are messy, it’s too complex. We need to simplify the user flow ».
- They want to make their website more user-friendly for the practitioners.
Potential brakes:
- It can be a hindrance for doctors to have to copy and paste the medical prescriptions on their business software. Most of them don’t prescribe in free text, they search in their medicines database.
— THE ROAD MAP
We established a roadmap to keep an organisation during those two weeks project. We use the collaborative tool Trello and define day by day our missions.
We worked for 7 days on the UX research and 7 days on the UI and prototype.
1. EMPATHISE
— THE SECONDARY RESEARCH
Medicine is a complex field, so we decided first to get familiar, and learn more about some specific health terms we discovered earlier during the kickoff to get into the project.
Protocol: A care protocol is the practice of a medical, paramedical or psychological act, established according to scientific literature, shared clinical experience, or the recommendations of a consensus of professionals. It is also the name of the document that attests to this practice
Posology: An indication of the dosage and frequency of use of a medicine.
Additional examinations include: Blood tests, blood counts, serologies, enzyme assays (transaminases, gammaGT, alkaline phosphatases), blood creatinine, chest X-ray, chest scans.
— THE FEATURE ANALYSIS
We started with a feature analysis, we discovered that only two websites are making standard medical prescriptions (Vidal reco and Antibioclic) but they all have clinical informations updated.
— THE ACTUAL WEBSITE
There is a home page with a research bar / the diseases specialities / and all the pathologies.
The result page is pretty messy: When a doctor type the name of a disease in the research bar, he founds out: additional exams / treatments / patients advices / and synthesis of the disease on the same page. The visibility is not very clear. As we are not practitioners we asked some doctors to tell us what do they think.
— THE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
To begin the research we started with 5 qualitative interviews of general practitioners. We had the chance to get a reseal from our client. We learned a lot from those stakeholders interview/
At the beginning we were struggling with the medical vocabulary of treatments because medicine is a very complex sector.
We learned that doctors feel frustrated because they are having a short time consultation with their patient, they would like to spend more time explaining them the diseases or treatments.
We also learned that they always need to check on specialized websites and in the books, in order to verify recommendations or eventual new cure.
They are also struggling with the medical prescription typing, they have to retype same treatments many times a day.
Some quotes from the interviews:
— THE AFFINITY DIAGRAM
To empathize more with our users, we used the affinity diagram. We discovered that all the users are frustrated because of the short consultations, they don’t have enough time to explain carefully all the recommandations to their patients, and mostly they struggle typing the prescriptions.
The insights from the affinity diagram: we discovered:
What do the users want:
- medical recommendations cards to give to the patients (diabete / ashtma /pregnancy/ cholestherol…)
- They always check recommandations online, so they need clinical reminders.
— THE PRIMARY USER PERSONA: Caroline Steopate
-GOALS / INTERESTS:
She reads books and attends various trainings and conferences to keep up with new medical practices. She has to check prescriptions for unusual pathologies in books or on the internet. She is tech savvy and uses many different websites to check her prescriptions. She wants to be a great doctor and would like to spend as much time as she can with her patients during the consultation.
-PAIN POINTS:
Typing medical prescriptions by hand can be a huge waste of time during the consultation. She doesn’t have time. Checking some clinical recommendations during the consultations takes time and does not make her look professional in front of her patients. She feels that the consultations are very short, she would like to spend more time with her patients to explain the treatments.
— THE USER JOURNEY MAP: Caroline Steopate meets a patient with an-usual pathology.
After that we created Caroline typical consultation when the patient has an unusual health issue.
She starts the day she feels happy a new patient is coming, she examines him but then she realized that she doesn’t really know those symptoms, so she prefers to check in her medicine book before prescribing anything.
After a quick research she still doesn’t sure, she wonders if she’s missing something ! Besides, she has to write the treatment herself in the software, and she doesn’t have time ! It already took her some time to do the research.
2. DEFINE
— THE PROBLEM & HYPOTHESIS STATEMENTS
The journey map helped us to visualize Caroline’s need and we found out a problem statement which is:
— THE JOBS TO BE DONE
Then to be sure to fit the users needs, we started to imagine some features regarding to the insights from the affinity diagram.
— THE MOSCOW METHOD — MVP
We decided the features we are going to add to the website.
As a must have section, of course our website is for general practitioners so we will have some clinical reminders, updated at date for trust, so that the doctors are sure that the website is updated frequently. We will have updated prescriptions and also advices for the patients, sources that are very important also for trust. And last very important feature is a « google like » search bar in order to help doctors to find directly easily the disease they are looking for.
Based on the these features list we could start digging around the problem by building our user flow and the site map.
— THE USER FLOW
We built our user-flow which is quite simple actually. Our primary persona arrives on the home page during her consultation, she types a disease in the search bar and arrives on the disease detail page where she can select treatments, additional exams and copy paste them. And when she’s done she closes the website.
— THE SITE MAP
The site map is also quite simple, when Caroline arrives on the home page, there is a direct access to the diseases and all the medical specialities. There is also direct access to the pathologies list and the about page. And of course the pathologies list will lead to the detail of the pathologies.
3. IDEATE
— MEDIUM FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
With all those features, the user flow and site map done, we could realized different versions of our medium fidelity prototype.
The version 1 has an horizontal navigation with the different kinds of infirmations.
The Version 2 has a vertical navigation.
On the version 3, there is no navigation at all but everything was on the same page to enable doctors to see directly what they are looking for.
And a last version 4 which is almost the same as version 3 but with dropdown categories, so the doctors can see the essential directly, without too much informations on the page.
— USABILITY TESTING
We tested all those 4 versions medium fidelity prototypes with 3 different doctors in order to get feedbacks and to be sure to choose a version that helps them finding infractions without any difficulties.
- They preferred the Version 1 because « it’s the simplest ». But we also realised that we missed important things on the prototype.
- The first one is that they needed a breads crumb for the internal navigation.
- The second one is that we should very display the updated at date on every page that was updated recently for doctors to trust that the website is maintained.
- Those texts content can be very long. So the tab of contents can help to navigate very quickly.
- And the last thing is that we should do an Empty State for treatment selection to make sure that the doctors really choose the treatment and not arrive on the active tab by default.
— BRAND ATTRIBUTES AND MOOD BOARD
After that we could define brand attributes and the moodboard to select colors and the atmosphere of the website.
— STYLE GUIDE
With the design we had a huge challenge:
About the visual we had to be minimalist, clean and clear. Don’t expect about fancy visual. It’s a medical work tool. The colors are classic and minimalist also.
We chose a simple and efficient typography Helvetica because the doctors may use old computers and new fonts cannot always be red by those systems. As they are going to copy paster in their software we couldn’t put fancy fonts because of the softwares. We need to keep it as simple as possible.
— HIGH — FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
We struggled with the text because we had to style only the text, it has to be informative more than « pretty » so we were looking for a lot of ideas and tried different ideas.
We built a simple landing page with the updated prescriptions highlighted because it’s very important for the doctors.
Here our primary persona, Caroline, arrives on the home page, she’s looking for the pathologie « Lombalgies » she types it in the search bar.
On the first page called « Clinical Reminders », which is the longest, she can navigates between the different sections with the navigation bar . We tried to make the information as much readable as possible by adding different levels of titles. On the second tab, the additional medical exams, she can select the different kind of exams that she could prescribe and copy paste it on the prescription. She can do the same thing for the treatments and the patients advices.
The last tab is all the sources that Ordotype used to build the contents.
You can check our Figma prototype here:
— CONCLUSION
- Medical environment is very complicated, there are a lot of technical terms, we had to look for on internet many times the signification of special terms to get into the project.
- There are many rules that cannot be broken in the design of medical infirmations.
- Architecture information is very challenging.
- We struggled a lot by styling the text which has to be very informative, no fancy at all. We did so many iterations, with different colors, fonts sizes.
It was really difficult to find a final version.
Also, all the diseases don’t have the exact same kind of treatments so we have to play with the tags on the cards to be as precise as possible, so the doctors can quickly find the right treatment.
- The site has to keep minimalist because there are a lot of informations to show.
- It was also difficult to not get too much in the colors because Ordotype product is a medical tool, so it’s not about visual design.
- At the end we felt really proud to be able to create a product that suit the stakeholder and the users needs. We believe the health sector is a very interesting domain that needs help to modernize the devices they are using and make it efficient, fluid and fast especially during this pandemic, where we need more than ever the doctors to get all the tools they need to do their job.
Thanks a lot to our client Ordotype, who trusted Alexandre and I for this really interesting project.
