MARYANDRES
.png)
Virtual Hospital Africa
Solving rural Africa's barriers to primary healthcare
The founders of Health Gateway Africa Trust are focused on reducing inequalities in healthcare for disadvantaged communities, especially women and children. The founders believe they can find sustainable solutions by leveraging existing clinics, hospitals, mobile internet, and special medical testing kits.
​
The founders noticed patients were being turned away from facilities that were understaffed and struggling with shortages
of diagnostics and broken supply chains. So they started Virtual Hospitals Africa and asked me to help create an appointment calendar for doctors.
My Role
UX Designer
Key Contributions
Concept Ideation
Competitive Research
User Research
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Duration
4 - 2 week sprints
The Team
2x UX Designer
5x Developers
Tools Used
Figma
Jira
Notion
Slack
Doctor Calendar
Reducing the stress and burnout that doctors experience is important for self-care as well as the well-being of their patients. Doctors spend long
hours (an average of 51 hours a week) under high pressure. Their work day involves managing multiple patients and making difficult medical decisions with almost half their day spent on administrative tasks.
The calendar offers a centralized location where doctors can manage patient appointments and personalized booking slots. An intuitive interface
and real-time updates optimize workloads so
doctors can focus more on their clinical responsibilities.
Providing timely consultations and continued clinical care is extremely important for managing extensive caseloads. I designed a simple yet powerful UI for viewing, scheduling, and editing appointment information.
Our users let us know that appointment management should be as straight forward as possible so they can get to what they need quickly. They also expected
to see the same features as on every other calendar.
The framework is simple, yet flexible enough to support switching between views and interacting
with information for different appointment types.
%20(1).png)
.png)
Doctors have so many responsibilities that demand their attention and time that access to information is a priority.
Reviewing patient medical records, updating patient charts, adjusting treatment plans, and attending meetings leave limited time between appointments.
I designed an interface around a tab navigation and visualized the appointments as cards. Appointments can be scanned in one glance. One-tap interactions allow for quickly switching between views to identify appointments by specific dates or status.
Having more control over their time and flexible work arrangements are sentiments shared by many doctors.
Unpredictable workloads requiring irregular shifts
or being on-call impact work-life balance, job satisfaction, and overall well-being. I visualized customizable appointment slots where doctors can allocate specific time based on the complexity of cases. Schedules can be quickly tailored to factor
in administrative tasks and personal commitments.
.png)
%20(1).png)
Our Challenge
How can we encourage healthcare providers to use virtual doctor consultations
to connect and communicate easily with patients?
Project Goals
Goal #1: Streamline patient appointment management for doctors.
Goal #2: Design an experience for the specific needs of doctors while ensuring a clear and user-friendly interface.
Where I started from
Putting the pieces together
In my first interview, the client gave an overview of the organization and the things they had been working on.
To supplement what they shared, I gleaned insights from doctors, articles, and competitors. I found that:
Insight #1 Stress and Burn Out
Users struggle with demanding workloads, emotionally challenging patient cases, and achieving work/life balance. Appointment, management becomes more
of a burden when they are using complex systems that require significant time to learn.
"I don't have time to figure it out. Too much
of my time is spent reaching out for assistance
or support ."
Insight #2 Inadequate Resources
Outdated systems have limited or no functionality for managing cancellations and no shows. New systems require searching through multiple screens and more time spent seeking help and support. Manual methods (e.g., paper calendars, sticky notes, and spreadsheets) result in misplaced schedules, scheduling errors, and conflicts.
"My patients need follow-up care and ongoing treatment at times. Some days its hard to keep track of."
Insight #3 Ineffective Staff Scheduling
A sudden increase in patients and insufficient coverage makes it difficult to ensure that on-call shifts are scheduled correctly and on time, and to prevent bias towards certain doctors.
"I more hours than my colleagues at times. I'm tired all the time but the need is just so great."
Activities & Outputs
4 Interviews
Secondary Research
Competitive Analysis
Understanding doctor's needs
Optimizing the workflow
To define the architecture of the web application, I asked 4 doctors to define the tasks they have a hard time with and that consume most of their time. These were shortlisted to the top of the list.
-
Releasing appointment slots when there are missed or cancelled appointments and conflicts with their schedule
-
Creating future appointments for patients that require follow-up care and treatment
-
Locate, view, and track appointment information
%20(1).png)
Defining the app architecture and user flow were critical for helping the team understand the types of of tasks that doctors need to complete. With this information, I created wireframes to share the app's page structure and layout.
Activities & Outputs
4 User Interviews
1 User Personas
3 User Flows
Wireframes
Aligning the solution
Getting it right
I led weekly meetings with the founder, design lead, and developers to walk through the designs. After conducting two rounds of user testing two main adjustments were made to the design.
Change #1
80% of users felt like it took to much time to add events and appointments to the calendar. As a result, the flows were combined in a single screen where the appointment type could be selected quickly.
Change #2
100% of users shared that they needed a way to address missed or cancelled appointments. The Delete button was replaced with a Reschedule button to factor in scheduling and patient conflicts.
.png)
Activities & Outputs
Hi-Fi Prototype
5 User Tests
Next Steps
Measuring Success
To date, we’ve launched our beta. We anticipating the launch of the web application in 2024. The outcome of this will be virtual doctor consultation for 200,000 patients. That is how many lives we are going to change by giving more clear access to healthcare.
I've identified 5 key metrics to measure the web application's usability and performance over time.
.png)
Task Success Rate
.png)
Average Time on Task
.png)
Average Completion Time
.png)
Error Rate
.png)
Retention Rate
Staying flexible is important
Lessons learned
A web application for a virtual hospital has many intricacies and complex workflows. I was filled with ideas; and often had to leverage my creativity within technical constraints. There were many times when the final outcome did not look like what I had designed.
Despite that I stayed open-minded and willing to adjust my approach to support the team. Overall, I learned that designs don't have to be perfect but should not sacrifice the overall user experience and aesthetics or performance/speed of a product.
See more of my work
.png)
.png)