The Process Of Forming A Product — ACD Hospital Mobile App: UX Case Study [Part 1]
ACD Hospital — a mobile app that digitizes physical services provided by ACD Hospital.
The context
The design of the app was created as a result of the UX Mentoring Program in Vietnam (https://www.uxmp.vn/).
The Team
Mentor: Shriya Shekhar
- Create the project timeline
- Give feedback on each stage of the design
Mentee: Steven (Tho) Doan
- Conduct competitor analysis and user research
- Draw wireframes
- Run user testings
- Write the case study
Mentee: May Nguyen Huynh
- Conduct user research
- Draw wireframes
- Create high fidelity prototypes
- Run user testings
Timeline
12 weeks from Aug 10 to Oct 18, 2020. We spent a few hours each week on this project.
The problem
How might we improve the patients’ experiences and reduce their unnecessary waiting time at hospitals in Vietnam?
The solution
A “hospital in your pocket” app — a mobile app that digitizes the majority of physical services at a hospital. In this case, the hospital is UXMP Hospital — an imagined hospital that has gone through some digital transformation to implement our solution.
Research
We started this project by gaining understandings of the users.
Quantitative research
We surveyed patients of different ages in Vietnam, and we figured out that overcrowding and long waiting times are the significant pain points for patients in Vietnam.
- When asked about what patients concern the most when going to the hospital, 82.6% of the reason is because of over-crowding and waiting time.
- When asked if patients could pick one reason that made them the most reluctant to go to the hospital, 60.9% chooses over-crowding and waiting.
Qualitative research
Together with the survey, we interviewed 8 people in Vietnam to gather information on their experiences at hospitals in Vietnam.
We discovered that:
- Long waiting time occurs due to the downtime between steps in the treatment process.
- Bad service attitude at the hospital happens due to patient overload.
- Patient overload happens because people in small provinces want to visit hospitals in major provinces.
Competitor analysis
After gaining empathy with patients in Vietnam, we examined the current digital healthcare solutions in the Nordics and Vietnam.
Below is our comparison of the features in some popular healthcare apps.
Things that these apps have in common:
- All apps provide these basic features: book appointments with doctors, calendar, history, patient profile, in-app payment, and FAQ.
- All apps are mobile native app, helping patients use them conveniently.
Things that these apps can improve:
- Only startups (like Doctor Anywhere) aim to solve problems that occurred during the whole patient journey. Hospitals use this type of apps to acquire patients; therefore, hospitals mainly focus on building the booking systems.
- Healthcare apps in Vietnam should create their own databases of existing patients, so when the patients register to use the app, the app will automatically import the patient’s data.
- Apps in Vietnam should improve their user interfaces and performances. The current UIs are old-fashioned and the apps still contain a lot of bugs.
After conducting research, we discovered that the limit of the healthcare system in Vietnam is the main reason to create unsatisfied patients’ experiences.
Therefore, we may need a radical innovation to improve the patients’ experiences and reduce their waiting time at hospitals in Vietnam.
Define persona
With the information we collected, we formed our primary user persona.
In general, our target users are those:
- Can use smartphones comfortably because smartphones are the medium to deliver our values to users.
- Are in the middle-income class or below because rich people can pay a lot of money to get premium services.
- Are busy with work so time is important to them.
Our ideation process
Step 1: Draw an AS-IS and TO-BE diagram
We started with forming the current and future journey of patients at a hospital.
This step helped us to identify the areas in the journey where the waiting time can be optimized. These areas are:
- When patients reserve an appointment with doctors physically at a hospital
- When patients go around a hospital to do lab tests
- When patients come back to meet doctors after finishing the lab tests
- When patients buy the medicines inside a hospital.
Step 2: Create a customer journey + Step 3: Brainstorming improvements
We divided the journey into four phases and analyzed the patients’ actions, thoughts, and emotions in each phase.
Under each phase, we gave ideas on how we could make the patient experiences better.
Step 4: Select the approach to solving the problem
In this step, we worked individually to come up with concrete approaches to the solution.
In the end, we selected approach one — A mobile app that is fully customized for a specific hospital. We named this imagined hospital as ACD Hospital.
Why we that approach:
- We realized that “Airbnb for patients” only solves a small part of a big puzzle. With the insights from our research, we need a radical innovation.
- To solve the problem, we decided to approach the solution from a holistic view. Instead of improving patients’ experience in specific moments when they are at hospitals, we examined the whole patient’s journey from coming to leaving the hospital.
- Which I showed you how we built the an MVP version of the product.
Thanks for reading!
