Key Facts
• The client had a successful web integration with a popular medical records program, and a customer was paying for a mobile version to be developed.
• The web app was incredibly powerful and needed to be distilled into its most essential forms for mobile, while leveraging the unique abilities of phones and tablets.
• The product shipped on time, with no requests for anything to be reworked or redone, only for new and expanded feature development. The collaboration with product and engineering set the standard for how teams work at the client today.
The Problem
There were several limitations and requirements for the customer:
• The web app was incredibly powerful and fully featured, with the ability to review almost any kind of content and take almost any action on it.
• The web app was incredibly powerful and fully featured, with the ability to review almost any kind of content and take almost any action on it.
• The app had to be available on tablets and phones running iOS or Android.
• The app had to be both FDA and NHS compliant for use in the US and UK.
• The client wanted to be able to sell a generic version of the app to other healthcare customers as well
The ability to view documents and images, as well as complete forms for specific patients was identified early on as a core requirement of the application.
The Solution
Working as the only designer on the project, I had to work with the customer to ensure their needs were met, while also closely collaborating with the product manager and engineers to make sure the product was delivered on time and to the standards the client expected and could be rolled out to other customers in the future.
• Research found doctors only needed 4 major functions on the go: reviewing basic records, completing patient forms, taking photos of patients, and completing deficiency paperwork.
• To make it generic, we built a simple interface for finding patients, including using mobile specific features such as scanning patient wristbands with the device’s camera
• In the interest of keeping the project responsive to device size and on time, I used well-known design paradgms, such as the master-detail view, to transition between form factors more smoothly
• So that doctors could leverage what they were already used to, I designed the system to use their exisiting charting categories and terms for viewing items in a patient’s chart and completing deficiencies for a chart.
In searching for patients, the app made the camera available to scan a patient's wristband to pull back records. To make screens easy to port between tablet and phone layouts, the team made heavy use of the "master-detail" paradigm.
Results
Ultimately, my engineering team and I were able to deliver on every single point of this project and then some:
• Every phase of the project was shipped on time to the customers.
• The designs performed exceptionally well in both usability and user acceptance testing.
• There were no requests to rework anything after shipping. Our team was solely able to focus on building and delivering even more new funcitonality to the app.
• The project became the standard for design and engineering collaboration for the client. They continue to use this model of collaboration today.