Imagine a world where you don’t need to call an ambulance and hearing all about how they don’t have time for you and your questions to ask how to prepare yourself for an operation or, God forbid; you seek advice on how to reduce fear of the process and seek some support.

Well, maybe this is a good starting point to that world!🤞

For one of the design agencies in Croatia, I was tasked with creating UX/UI design for mobile application in the medical segment.

From the agency side, I received a brief:

Through background research, I found a fascinating study on the “Age of patients undergoing surgery,” I found out that over 50% of patients undergoing surgery are between 35 and 70 years old.

From this, I decided to target mostly middle-aged people as my primary users. Besides that, I read many blogs and studies on what are a thing people are most afraid of and what are their biggest concerns.

From there, I created a problem statement based on collected findings and data so I could proceed to the next phase — user research.

Based on this problem statement, I developed a hypothesis:

This app would significantly reduce the number of inquiries and hospital visits from people preparing for an operation or healing, which means more staff and doctors available to do other tasks and hypothetical conduct more operations.

The most significant user benefit is having all the information about the operation and how the operational process looks in one place. That would mean a relaxed and peaceful state of mind for a user.

Before conducting any user research, I wrote down a simple research plan to organize and prepare myself.

To learn more about the target audience and their pain points, I conducted Four in-person interviews with users who are awaiting surgery or that were at least once on the operating table last year.

After conducting interviews and thorough analysis, I summarized the data to critical insights that will later influence the whole UX and UI design.

I also created an empathy map to understand end-users attitudes and behaviors.

Side note: Before these drawings, I made a dozen screen sketches that were a similar variant of these sketches. They finally led me to these sketches, which were the beginning and inspiration for creating wireframes.

Wireframes

These wireframes are not the final design because some elements were added to the UI design process. Instead, I was inspired to make them while designing other aspects(they would either complement the existing component or expand the current context).

And I want to point out the importance of just trying any design idea and pattern that comes across because they play a significant role in creating more suitable and meaningless solutions for end-user.

After creating wireframes, I sent the prototype to the same people I interviewed to validate my idea before going on into the design.

I gave them two tasks:

1. Find more information about the operation itself

2. Check what your upcoming commitments are and add your own

After the completion, I asked them whether they managed to complete the task and whether there was anything unclear or misleading.

Check out the prototype here.

All four respondents completed both tasks and fully understated what the application was about and how to navigate through the app.

With wireframes in place and supercharged creativity in my pocket, I translate all those data into friendly and calm UI.

I decided to go with a calm and relaxing palette of color because this app's main task is to provide the user peace of mind. When choosing the font family, I wanted to use a more unformal typeface for headlines to support the calming feel of colors and a regular typeface for body and subheading for better readability. 

While searching for icons, I came across this great pack with many free icons designed explicitly for the health sector.

Here you can access the final prototype.

What did I learn?

The wholeness of the UX and UI process has more impact on us as users than we think it has. To be able to produce a design that solves actual problems of users and to get ideas and insights from simple conversations with people seems like some cheat code that you would type in GTA back in the days because you are designing with keeping users in the center of that whole process and to me, that is something remarkable and win-win situation both for the company and the user.