Healthscribe enables users to log and track their health data, and provides insights that help identify patterns and isolate causes for various health issues.
The digital age has ushered in an era of cutting-edge healthcare technology and tools. Life expectancy has been steadily increasing from the 1950s, and people are living healthier lives due to advances in medicine. However, the busy, erratic and largely sedentary nature of people’s lifestyles has resulted in the proliferation of chronic diseases and recurring health issues. Data reported by the CDC shows that 6 out of 10 Americans have chronic diseases and 4 in 10 adults in the US have multiple chronic health issues. The data also shows that the leading causes of these health issues are poor eating habits, lack of physical activity, and excessive use of tobacco and/or alcohol.
For effectively treating these recurring health issues, it is important for both doctors and patients to know how a patient’s symptoms have changed over time, what changes have they made in their lifestyle, and what medication has/has not been effective in the past. The use of patient diaries, or symptom trackers, can offer valuable insight into understanding the correlation between symptoms, individual lifestyle and food choices, and medication over a period of time. This can help both patients and doctors make more informed decisions on a potential diagnosis or course of treatment.
We conducted customer interviews with 8 users who have recurring health issues to understand the problem space better. Some of the questions that we asked our target users were as follows:
Research results from our customer interviews on how users currently keep track of their health-related information gave us some interesting insights:
We also conducted some preliminary analysis of the competitive landscape to understand how crowded the solution space for this product is, and to get an idea for what features our competitors have or lack. For our competitor analysis we mainly focussed on Android/iOS apps:
From our analysis, we discovered that there are not many apps that completely solve the problem of health tracking and insights in a holistic and affordable manner. Most of the above apps either have missing features, cluttered or non-user friendly UI choices, or are too expensive for continued use.
We also went through the user reviews for the above listed apps to get more qualitative data on user pain points and needs.
Our proposed high-level solution is to build a mobile-first web app that provides users an easy way to record and track illness symptoms and their intensity, food, drinks, medication and other health information all in one place. The user will also be able to see charts based on their past health records providing useful health insights.
Based on user pain points collected from our initial research, we prioritized the features we want to deliver based on the following parameters:
Must-haves
Good-to-have
Future backlog
Log Event
Log Event_Symptoms
My Timeline
View Analysis
Log Event
Log Event_Symptom
Timeline
Insights
Iterative Design Learnings
Low Fidelity: Since 91% of people own mobile smartphones, and 90% of mobile time is spent using apps, we took a mobile first approach to designing the HealthScribe web application. Early usability testing with a low-fi prototype validated that we had achieved our goal of designing a minimal and fluid user experience. 100% of users were able to quickly create a profile, log and edit a symptom, and view their information in a visual format.
Despite the ease of use, most participants articulated they still expected to receive more guidance as they navigated through the screens. We added coach marks to explain the primary actions that users can take in the app.
A/B Testing: We conducted A/B testing to establish branding that would appeal to users. Two designs were showcased: a natural design with muted colors and images of real people, and a colorful design that included illustrated characters. 57% users found the colorful design more engaging and user friendly.
Hi-Fidelity: After testing our high-fidelity prototype, we gained insight into the user’s preferences for the overall aesthetics of the HealthStream web app. The participants helped us identify errors, shared their preference for a lighter, more modern interface.
Hi-Fidelity v2: There are so many benefits to using Healthscribe that we wanted to ensure that all users could access it. We added an aspect ratio of 2:1 to the screens to account for users with feature phones (e.g., BlackBerry, flip phones) or older devices.
Our primary focus shifted to balancing the user’s needs and our wants with technical constraints. To stay on track, we categorized and prioritized the user feedback so that we could identify immediate fixes and estimate the time needed for more complex improvements.
We will be continuing this project together in the near future. Below is the Go-to-market Plan and the product roadmap:
Go-to-market Strategy
Product Roadmap
Colab offered me an exceptional opportunity to work with a cross functional team of software developers and designers. It emulated an actual company’s product pod in many ways - we collected user feedback at every step of the process to iterate on our product, prioritized and de-scoped features as needed, and followed scrum guidelines to aid timely execution.
Through my experience I learnt:
Working in a cross-functional team has been an invaluable experience where I learned from my team members diverse perspectives and experiences. Communicating early and consistently was critical and helped me to learn what mattered most to our product manager and developers to ensure they had what they needed. Through this experience, I learned to
During my time with CO.LAB I learnt that effective communication is key to shipping an MVP. I learnt how to build a cross functional application that is scalable on different devices ranging from android, ios and desktops. I have learnt that taking an idea from the ideation stage depends on how effective a team can communicate and share ideas to develop an MVP.
My journey at CO.LAB was not without challenges, and since I value learning, this was a chance to learn how to solve such challenges and overcome them. Working in a cross-functional team requires effective high-level communication skills. My key 8 weeks of learning:
We had some struggles along the way with the developers having time constraints and little overlap of coding language familiarity. We also learnt how quickly a lack of communication can impede progress. We were able to adapt to these challenges by improving communication within the team, de-scoping certain goals for the product, and making difficult tradeoffs to be able to deploy a usable version of our product within the given time limitations.