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Health Buddy

Bringing convenience and efficiency to the digital healthcare service

Overview

Health Buddy is a public healthcare mobile app developed by the SingHealth Group. The project aims to redesign the mobile app to make it simple and easy to use.  

 

This is a group project with 5 team members, in which I  took the role of Project Manager and UX Designer.

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Process Overview

Throughout the project, we incorporated the double diamond process. Below is the summary of the design iteration stages and the methods we used.

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About Health Buddy

Health Buddy is a mobile app that was developed by the SingHealth Group in 2012 with the aim to give users convenience to make and reschedule appointments and access their healthcare information. 

Some of the main features are:

  • Manage appointment (view, make new appointment, reschedule)

  • Register and track their queue status

  • Payment online

  • Place Medicine Orders / Reminders

  • Managed dependants’ needs (for elderly parents and / or children)

Business Goal:

  • Increase number of active users

  • Encourage user to book and reschedule appointment via app  to reduce the number of calls to the hotline

  • Improve UI to be up to date with current trend

DISCOVER

Understanding Current Situation

The first step that we took was to perform heuristic analysis to see the problem with the current app. And here’s what we found from the current app.

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Competitive & Comparative Study

Next, we did comparative and competitive analysis with other apps in the market. For the competitors, we selected Health Hub and One NUHS mobile app since they also provided similar services. We learned what are the positives that we could implement and the negatives that we should avoid.

 

We also take a look at what others have been doing for registration and queue tracking from Samsung service centre and Genki Sushi restaurant.

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User Research

​We conducted user interview and usability test on the existing app to understand more about the existing problem.

Participants

10 users

  • Both married & single

  • Age 28-40

Method

  • Usability test on existing Health Buddy mobile app

  • User interview (both remote and  in person)

Criteria

  • Uses public healthcare system, whether as subsidised or private patient and using some sort of healthcare service app

Objectives

  • To understand users’ journey when using public healthcare services 

  • Find out users’ pain points while using HealthBuddy app

DEFINE

Affinity Mapping

We gathered all the insights from our user interview and conducted affinity mapping together in order to identify the users' pain points. Here are 4 key insights from the data that we’ve synthesized:

1

I want to use my time efficiently

2

I want my experience to be seamless without extra steps

3

I need detailed but easy-to-understand information

4

I want a clean app interface so I can easily find the features I need

User Persona

We recognised 3 key user types who use the app and therefore we formed these user personas.

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Busy Beatrice

35, Married without kids, not a caregiver

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Caregiver Cathryn

29, Dating, caregiver to parents

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Regular Rayner

42, Married with kids, not a caregiver

BEHAVIOR

  • Choose clinic based on location

  • Book appointments in advance and save into her own calendar

  • Queue, pay and do medicine delivery via app to avoid waiting at the clinic

  • Keeps up to date with her parents’ medical activities and needs

  • Main liaison for her parents’ medical appointments, medicine, and bills

  • Try  to manage everything in the app.

  • Goes for regular medical appointments

  • Takes regular long-term medication

  • Needs to log his medical readings to show to his doctor at his appointments

GOALS

  • Minimize time on waiting and queueing

  • Simple and straightforward services and functions

  • Have all the information she needs at her fingertips to plan her time properly

  • Wants to quickly access the most important features she needs to manage her parents’ medical activities

  • Manage her parents’ and her own medical activities all in one app

  • Toggle easily between different parents’ accounts (and her own)

  • To have overview of all his appointments and their details (e.g. purpose, location)

  • Easy way to view and log personal medical data/stats

  • Fuss-free way to refill long-term medication when needed

  • Have to wait at the polyclinic so she doesn’t miss her queue number

  • Too many clicks and steps in the app

  • Unsure about the steps during her appointments

FRUSTRATIONS

  • App is cluttered and overwhelming, so it’s difficult to find the information and feature she needs

  • Always have to login with Singpass everytime she switches profiles or pages

  • Appointment details are lacking - do not tell him purpose of visit

  • Not enough information provided for each medication (only scientific names), so he sometimes gets confused

Problem Statement, HMW, and Solution Statement

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Busy Beatrice

Beatrice needs a fast and efficient way to book and manage her medical appointments because she likes to plan her schedule properly to avoid wasting time on queueing and waiting.

How might we..

  • make it faster and more efficient for Beatrice to book and manage her medical appointments?

  • help Beatrice avoid queueing and waiting?

  • help Beatrice plan her schedule efficiently when she needs to go to a doctor’s appointment?

Solution

Redesign the Appointment and eQueue functions in Health Buddy so that Beatrice can

  • book her appointment without any unnecessary steps

  • track her queue and appointment progress easily

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Caregiver Cathryn

Cathryn needs an easy way to access and manage the medical needs of the people under her care so that she can fulfil her caregiving duties quickly and without fuss.

How might we..

  • help Cathryn fulfil her caregiving duties in an quick and fuss-free manner?

  • make it more intuitive for Cathryn to access and manage the medical needs of the people under her care?

Solution

Redesign the Homepage and Payment functions so that Cathryn can

  • seamlessly switch between her dependents’ and her own medical profile

  • access and manage her dependents’ medical needs and services easily and intuitively

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Regular Rayner

Rayner needs accurate information about his medical needs and activities at his fingertips so that he can keep track of and manage his health in preparation for his doctor appointments.

How might we..

  • help Rayner get to the key information he needs about his medical needs?

  • help Rayner keep track of and manage his healthcare to prepare for his next doctor’s appointment?

Solution

Redesign the Medicine and Health Champ functions so that Rayner can

  • View all his medicine information easily and accurately

  • Monitor and record his medical data effortlessly

DESIGN & ITERATE

Ideation and Design Process

As this is the first time we worked in a group, it was a struggle to come out with the design and create the prototype together. It took longer to decide and design because now we have to get agreement as a team on the direction to go.

Nevertheless, we managed to produce both mid-fi and high-fi prototypes and conducted 2 rounds of usability tests. Here's some design changes that we did in comparison to the original app.

Homepage Main Services | Reduce Clutter

eQueue & Tracking | View appointment & track  progress easily

Home Page |  Switch profile seamlessly

Medicine |  View medicine information easily

High-Fi Usability Study

Participants

8users

(same participants from initial user interview)

Scenario & Tasks

For All

For Busy Beatrice

  • View unpaid bills

  • Identify the tasks that can be completed in the Appointments page

  • Book appointment for a specialist service

For Caregiver Cathryn

  • Change profile

  • Check and pay medical bills for dependent

For Regular Rayner

  • Find out information about a medicine

  • Order medicine refill

Results

What users like

  • [General] App was intuitive to use and visually clean and pleasing.

  • [Appointment] Useful information provided (e.g. fasting instructions for tests)

  • [eQueue] Useful information in the pop-up confirmation.

  • [Payment] Able to view bill breakdown in-app without downloading the bill.

What needs to be improved (implemented in the Final Proto)

  • [eQueue] Make the entire "Current Appointment" status box clickable to make it easier for user to open the tracking progress.

  • [eQueue] Use a "X" button to close the progress bar instead of swipe up motion to avoid accidental close when scrolling down.

  • [Appointment] On the make new appointment flow , change "by location" tab to "by facility" because users expected to use location service to find the nearest institution.

SUS Score

​​

57

/ 100

78

/ 100

Current App

High-Fi

37%

What needs to be improved (for future)

  • [General] Font sizes might be small for elderly. Provide an option for bigger font size.

  • [Medicine] Include more photos (e.g: box packaging) in the medication detail page to avoid confusion for medication that looks similar.

  • [Appointment] Enable location service once it's technically viable.

DELIVER

Final Prototype

We implemented some of the key feedback from usability test findings to produce the final prototype. Feel free to play with the clickable prototype or view the video below.

Busy Beatrice

Make a new appointment

Register & Track Queue

Caregiver Cathryn

Switch profile and view information

Regular Rayner

View and order medicine

DELIVER

Mobile & Desktop Website

We also did the mobile web and desktop screens as part of the project deliverable. As SingHealth already has their own respective website, we want to have an informative site to educate users on why they should be using Health Buddy. This website provides information regarding Health Buddy’s functions as well as direct users on where they can download the application.

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Reflections

Challenges

It was really challenging since all of us are doing this course part time. As project manager, at first I approached it as what I did before in my full time job. Divide the work, get everyone's agreement and make them accountable for it. But it wasn’t as straightforward in this part time course as everyone has different bandwidth and capacity. So adjustment had to be done along the way and be more flexible, understanding and compassionate toward each other.​

It was the first time we were doing the prototype together in the same Figma file. As everyone has different ways of doing things, it’s extremely important to communicate properly with each other. Over communicating in this case is better than none. 

What I learned

The good part being in a group is that I can learn from each other. Because of the diverse job experience, my teammates have different areas of strengths that I could learn from, such as how to structure the user research questions and conduct interviews, how to create a template for the design system and set up the UI screens, how to make use of Figma components to prototype better and how to present better.

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