Designing an application to assist patients in quarantine: UX Case Study
Disclaimer: This is a personal project and I was not commissioned by any individual/corporation to design this application.
Brief
This design prompt was given to me as a design assignment. I’ll be walking you through the case study, explaining how I went around the problem and came up with a solution.
Prompt
Scenario
Since the onset of the pandemic, almost every one of us has seen the journey of contracting the virus either for ourselves or closed ones. Home isolation is one of the phases of the journey where the patient has to measure vitals (Temperature, SpO2) regularly, take medicines and even update their doctor all virtually and on their own.
Scope
- Design an app for people going through the 14 days of home isolation.
- Should include features of vital & medicine tracking, doctor communication.
Research and understanding
Goals
Make the process of 14 days of home isolation easier.
Assumptions
- Doctors/nurses monitor health of patients remotely from a dashboard.
- User is already under quarantine and the infrastructure to facilitate the same is already present.
- A health care professional is assigned to each patient.
- IoT based devices to measure vitals is already supplied to the patient.
In case the last one is a bit hazy, we need a device to actually measure the vitals of the patient. Something like this! Bluetooth connected oximeters will work as well. I’m not going to put those images here as it is copyrighted.
So, who’s our user?
- Age: 20s to 70s
- Tech literacy: Poor to Rich
- Languages: Various
The diversity of the choice of users makes it essentially hard to design this application. We need to facilitate the app to users that have various tech literacy, languages and the extreme ends of age demographic.
Different solutions proposed
- One-on-one video interviews with health care professionals along with vital sign evaluations and medicine tracking.
- Notifications for reminding the patient about medications. Health care professionals intervene only at signs of danger.
- Automated system to track the vitals using predefined computational models without the healthcare officers always in the mix unless there’s critical signs of danger.
Choosing a good solution
- Solution 1 which involves video meetings with each a every patients sound like a good idea, but it just involves and lot of effort and it’s just not feasible for healthcare professionals to have that kind of time amidst a global pandemic.
- Solution 2 provides a solution in which the doctors aren’t in the mix unless there is a dire need(in cases of emergencies). But this makes the user feel alienated from the society and make the journey of 14 day home isolation after contracting the virus very stressful and scary.
- Solution 3 provides a good mix of healthcare professionals and also doesn’t do it so much as to make the solution infeasible. Thus, solution 3 is the way to go.
Creating a user flow
I apologize for the rough sketch :)
Final Solution
Make the app multilingual
Make the process of connecting the device to the mobile application easier
Introduction to the health care professional to humanize the experience
Tasks and Communication
Data about the vitals and health of the user is intentionally abstracted from the user. The user is not necessarily an expert or is already stressed and scared due to the contraction of virus and quarantine. That data can be directly accessed by the doctors and healthcare professionals and they can contact the user in case they feel the need to intervene.
The user should be able to call the doctor easily in case of emergencies and hence the “call button” is primary and the “text button” is secondary.
Final Screens
What’s next?
This solution could use a lot of improvements. This is a take-home assignment, so I didn’t have much time to design this. But I’ll keep editing this article ever so often.