CareHub
My Role
UI/UX Designer/Researcher
Tools
Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop
Team
Solo Project
Duration
11 weeks
The Product
CareHub is a mobile app designed to enable medical professionals to to document, store, and reference patient records at a primary care offices.
Problem
Primary care institutions are facing issues with how they’re currently storing and referencing patients’ data, including a reliance on centralised databases that are vulnerable to server outages, a lack of offline access when systems go down, slow loading times that hinder efficiency, overly complex user interfaces that reduce usability, and fragmented, segregated systems that make accessing complete patient information difficult.
Goal
CareHub aims to provide a fast, reliable, and user-friendly platform for managing patient records, enabling healthcare professionals to securely access and update information both online and offline, while unifying previously fragmented systems into a single, seamless experience.
User research
To understand user frustrations, needs and requirements, I conducted user research through surveys for my project. My goal was to gain as many insights into the needs and wants of users that I can use to better design my app. From the responses I had received from the surveys I came across these common pain points that users were currently experiencing with the current software they were using.
Complicated user flow
Current EHR are often very complicated, making it hard for users to find information
Slow loading times
Systems sometimes take a long time to fully load and access patient information
No universal database of patients
Currently there isn’t a universal hub that all medical institutions can access to access all patient data
No offline access
Current EHR systems have no access to any databases when either their servers are down or no internet connections are available
User Personas
Based on the insights gathered from my initial user research I created three user personas to represent the key users on and their needs. By synthesising these findings into realistic personas, I was able to better empathise with users’ frustrations and prioritise design decisions that address their core challenges. The personas served as a point of reference throughout the design process, ensuring that solutions remained user centred and aligned with real world needs.
User Journey Maps
Now that my personas were created, I then moved on to create user journey maps for each persona to visualize how they may go through their normal working day interacting with systems while completing key tasks. empathizing with their potential feelings. By mapping these experiences, I was able to identify critical moments of friction and opportunities for improvement, helping to inform more intuitive and efficient design solutions.
Information Architecture
Guided by the above user journey maps, I’ve structured the information architecture that focuses on simplifying navigation, reducing unnecessary steps, and ensuring critical patient information is easy to locate. I made sure to organize the content in a clear and logical way, streamlining the process for medical professionals to access and manage patient information.
Initial Wireframes
I then moved on to sketching the initial wireframes of the app’s design, allowing me to rapidly iterate on ideas while focusing on translating user needs and pain points into clear design solutions, exploring the basic layout, structure, and functionality, and ensuring that the core features and navigation were intuitive before moving on to the next stage.
Lo-Fi Wireframes
Once I was happy with my initial wireframes I then decided to put my sketched into Figma and refined those initial concepts into a more structured and interactive format. Building on the early sketches, this stage focused on improving layout consistency, navigation, and overall user flow. These wireframes allowed for clearer visualisation of the app’s functionality and provided a foundation for usability testing and further iteration before progressing to high-fidelity designs.
I created a low-fidelity prototype to demonstrate the basic user flow and core functionality of the app. At this stage, the focus was on simulating key interactions and navigation paths, allowing for early testing before incorporating it into the final design.
Usability Study
After the creation of the low-fidelity prototype I conducted an unmoderated online user testing using Useberry, I had a sample size of 10 participants. The sample consisted of a mix of healthcare professionals in a primary care environment.
The study was conducted remotely, by using Useberry’s features allowing participants to go through a series of predetermined tasks within their own time.
After receiving all of my result from the usability study, these were the key findings I noticed from the results from the study.
Finding 1
No ‘Forgot Password’ link on the homepage
Finding 2
Users would much rather have the navigation menu to always be visible instead of hidden behind a hamburger menu
Finding 3
User have made it clear that patients key information should be visible on a patient profile card
Finding 4
Not easy creating/accessing notes or tasks
Hi-Fi wireframes
At this stage, I take all the participants feedback I had received from the usability study and use that to enhance the visual detail and consistency, of my current lo-fi wireframes while also addressing usability issues identified during the study. By incorporating user feedback, the designs became more intuitive and aligned with user needs, providing a more realistic representation of the final product.
With the high-fidelity wireframe designs finalized, I then moved onto developing the high-fidelity prototype to provide a realistic and interactive representation of the final app.
Conclusion
Working on this project was very challenging and very insightful. It taught me a lot of what’s required to build a product from the ground up. It reinforced the importance of a user-centred design approach, particularly when working within complex systems such as healthcare. Through conducting user research and analysing pain points, I learned how valuable it is to deeply understand user needs before moving into design solutions. If I had more time I would have liked to try in person interviews to better emphasize with users and their needs for my initial research and usability study.
Overall, this project allowed me to grow both my design thinking and problem-solving skills, while emphasising the importance of designing with empathy and purpose.
Moving forward I plan to obtain UX/UI feedback from designers with more experience in the field to improve the overall design and functionality of the app. Once I have documented all feedback that was provided, I will make the necessary design updates in order to improve the app’s overall experience.