Patient Access

Offline Case study available, with a more in-depth walk through

Objectives and outcomes

Need for a healthcare service For the first time, in the history of health care, anyone in need of advice or service can use Patientaccess.com 

Book an appointment  Anyone can now successfully book a service regardless of who their Gp provider is with 

Choose your location Choose a location, time and type of appointment that is convenient for you. 

Cross-linking to patient.info Now that Patient is aligned with both Patient Access and Patient Info we can now share content and information to inform and help our users to create informed decisions about their health.

For the first release, we will be focusing on partnering with the biggest pharmacies in the UK to allow users of the app to book appointments or those who seek medical help, advice or services outside of their GP surgery. The strain on GPs today is at an all-time high that is why we are launching market place, we know this will elevate some of the unnecessary appointments that patients book every day. Something as simple as a medication review or lowering your medication can be done at your pharmacy and that’s one more appointment a GP has to offer to other patients. 

One thing that has held Patient Access back is only allowing users from Emis run GP surgeries (They provide software to 60% of GPs.) With market place, we will allow anyone to sign up for an account and use our app- which is exciting! 

How I did it 

When I was given the brief for the project, I was excited to be back on the project, half a year before this I conducted qualitative research into the pharmacist and their daily lives in London. I believe that this helped me to create a much more thought-through and empathetic approach to revolutionising the work of pharmacists and alternative healthcare approaches. We needed to design a well-thought-through user experience that would alleviate the strain on pharmacists, Gps and users of the NHS.

I needed to create modular components for patientaccess.com 

At this point the website was built in react and our engineering team in Chennai rebuilt it in HTML and CSS which helped me to work closely with the team making sure during the QA everything was as per design. Rather than creating a new design for each page on the market place (over 40+ pages) I simplified the process to modular components, it saved myself and the engineering team a lot of time and money. 

This was my first time creating components for a CRM system, I started to realise pretty quickly that I needed to focus what was needed to make this project successful I needed figure out what was needed from me what was needed from the engineering team, what was needed from the business, and what will the users need. I started looking through my previous research for landing pages and then moved onto marketplaces, CMS tools, booking websites etc to see what similarities are used to create a coherent user experience that is seamless for the user to use. Then I started to investigate how do users get from the beginning through to purchasing or using the product? What makes then use this over the other competitors? What was UX friendly or what pain points did I reach whilst using the product. How would a disabled person interact with this? Is it responsive friendly? Does it work with a screen reader? 

I then honed in on my research to CMS- to create a certain amount of modular components that will be used throughout the website. But I needed to figure out how many content modules do we need? In the beginning, I thought about 20+. But I took a step back to see what is a realistic approach. 

What do we need? What does the content team need for the CMS tool to provide the best experience for the user? For example, one module could be: 

• One line of text 

• A paragraph

• An image with a paragraph on the left then another on a right 

• Single image 

I had a quick search for booking websites like Treat well, hosting on Airbnb, to name a few and this is where everything fell into place. I could finally see where my findings, research and ideas were coming into place! I absolutely love it when that happens! I realised that I don't have to over complicate my thinking and design process. I don't want to overcomplicate this for the people that are going to be using it. 

Module sketching 

Quick thinking 

With a variety of CRM tools on the market, Patients content team needed a tool that would enable them to create the best health information without having to overwhelm themselves from choosing which module should go where or if a module were similar could we simply them together and they can remove an element inside of it.

• What to expect 

• Related information 

• Ratings

• Locations? 

• Quick bullet points 

When embarking on any project I firmly believe that putting pen to paper can helps to quickly get your ideas out. The beauty of quick sketches is that you don’t need to focus on the minute details, it gives you the freedom away from judgement. Once I am happy with a series of sketches I draw them out again so I can present them in a quick meeting with the required stakeholders and the dev team ( mostly front end and maybe head of the development team). Once everyone involved is on board with the progress so far, I take the sketches into Balsamiq and see if what I’ve thought through will work on the computer. Although Balsamiq is not pixel perfect design, it allows me to map out the basics and see where I am going and if I need to re-work a design.

Once I am happy with the designs, I upload them to a new Invision file and share it will everyone involved.

High fidelity designs

The next step is where the designs come to life. This is where I can bring all my research and wireframes to life. I’ve included the 4 designs below in both web and responsive to show how they will work and look at different states.

As you can see with the below modules, some are following what I initially sketched out and others are completely new. Sometimes its when you’re designing from your initial wire frames, you realise you could do x, y and Z but you only designed for a, b, c. That’s ok though, that allows you to explore new possibilities and if we as designers are staying firmly to the beginning idea with out exploring more whilst you’re designing them. They should be used as a guide not a to the point design.

When reaching this stage, I like to kick off a meeting with everyone involved to get the design approved and see if everyone is onboard and then have a meeting with the Chennai team to walk everyone through the project to make sure they understand the what why and how of the project. I always like to make sure they understand what I need from them and that the designs are final- unless we are restrained for time, development team resources are low or they’re unable to technically make it (although this should be picked up earlier in the project as now it would set everyone back till I have created the new designs).

Finally- Case study for PA market place-

As this is under a NDA, I can showcase the research, design and outcomes from the project during interviews!