GritWell

2019 Summer Internship

Company
GritWell is a HealthTech startup that aims to treat chronic disease at its root. It enables chronic patients to schedule alternative practitioners in an easy and affordable way.

Products
1 mobile app and web portal for Patient
1 Practitioner Portal

Period
2019 July-Sep (9 weeks)

My Role
Product Design Intern

Responsibility
Redesign Patient App and Practitioner Portal, and build booking feature on Patient Portal

Skills
Need Assessment, Product Thinking, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Testing, Project Management, Cross-functional Collaboration

Overview

This Summer I interned at GritWell as product designer. My primary role was to improve the usability and user flow of GritWell patient app, and applied the new designs across different GritWell products to ensure consistency in user experience.

In 9 weeks, I collaborated with founder, developers, PM, and my UX mentor to research, design, prototype, test and deliver codable designs in the end of my internship. Since some of the product features are still in the development process, I will share some takeaways and non-confidential details of my internship. The design decisions details will not be shared.

What I did

Running usability studies

I began my Summer by conducting need assessment and usability study to test the current mobile app and practitioner portal that we wanted to launch soon. I worked with the Founder and PM to understand the research objective and crafted questions for online survey questionnaire and usability testing.

Very unexpected insights

While I analyzed the user feedbacks from my study, I uncovered many usability issues that need to be solved. In particularly, the app booking flow elicited many negative reactions from participants.

Insights from research:

App Booking process is too lengthy.
“It is a real hassle the app requires so many steps before completing a booking.”
Doctor info page lack of information hierarchy
“Too many unimportant information highlighted."
Poor date picker design that confuses users.
” How do select a time from the menu?”

Prioritizing the task

I categorized all the issues I found, and worked with the Founder and PM to decided the ones that were priorities. As acquisition is the top goal, we decided to focus on iterating booking feature of all GritWell platforms. I planned 2 design sprints to enhance the booking feature across GritWell platforms by phases. The first design sprint was for the patient app, and the second design sprint was for the patient web portal and a practitioner portal.

1st Design Sprint | Patient App Redesign

Streamlining current user flows

To help me further understand the current booking process, I mapped out all the process required for a booking. Then I changed the register step and removed the unnecessary steps to get users through their booking fast with little effort.

Current Booking Process : Register first, then book

New Booking Process : Search first, register before you pay

Sketch, feedback, iterate

Once the flow is confirmed, I started to redesign the pages to fix the usability issues with booking. I explored the ways that we could solve the problems. Sketching them not only helped me think through and develop my ideas, but it made it easy to get feedback from others.

Mid-fi Prototype

More testings and developing principles

After a lot of sketching and getting feedback from the team, I created mid-fi prototype for more testings. From these testings, I not only discovered the usability issues, but developed principles as clear, simplicity and scalability that I knew my final solutions should embody. This helped dictate design direction, tough choices and shaped the final product.

Insights from testings:

Video and avator take up 2/3 of screen space.
Timezone difference is a challenge for virtual consultation booking.

Design Change

Make profile picture a video to utilize the space and encourage a rapid booking.
Add timezone selector to state the timezone that users are booking the appointment in.

2nd Design Sprint

Implementing the feature across platforms

For the second design sprint, I focused on designing the booking feature for both practitioner and patient portals to ensure the consistent experience of GritWell ecosystem.

01 Building booking feature for patient web portal

02 Creating a timezone selector on practitioner portal

Allow practitioners to set time for their practice. It will automatically be converted to the correct time in the user's time zone on the app.

Final Design

01 Patient App

02 Patient Portal

03 Practitioner Portal

Takeaway

1. Design a cross-platform feature

For the first time, I designed functions that span multiple platforms. It allows me to both think on the mobile screen and design from a system perspective. When designing, I began to consider more factors, such as consistency, scalability, and design conventions to make sure the design solutions can be adapted to all platforms. Through this process, I was able to maintain the consistency of the design language while maintaining the same user experience on the entire platform.

2. Deal with ambiguity

Working environment at startup is full of ambiguity. On my first day, when my manager told me about the ongoing projects and the future plans, I was excited about the possibility but also felt lost about a lot of unknowns and uncertainty. Then I found a good way to manage it by using the power of why. Inspired by Simon Sinek's "Golden Circle" theory, during my internship I often asked “why-how-what” questions before the project start to help me clarify the problems, goals, and get better design results.

Why - why are we doing what we are doing? why do we develop product X or service Y?what challenges we are helping users overcome?
How – how does product Y / feature X helping our users?
What – what are we offering? what are the features/user experience benefits users the most?