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Both recent trends in the tech world and people’s expectations set up various challenges that any industry is bound to face eventually. The healthcare sector faces even more scrutiny and pressure considering the sheer number of people that depend on health applications and devices being useful, stress-free, and working like a swiss watch.
This leads us to healthcare UX, which is more than just the design of mobile apps and medical websites. Innovative solutions to improve patient care, practical wearables, numerous programs that hospitals use to organize their work—all of these tools need to not only be functional but also deliver a great experience.
UX design has a way of elevating a simple piece of software that only gets the job done and nothing else to a coherent and elegant application able to provide convenience and enjoyment to anyone using it. Let’s go through nine instances where healthcare and UX can still make a lot more effort.
Ever since the global popularization of smartwatches, medical wearables have also been seeping into our everyday lives. The continual layering of not only entertaining but also useful functionality has further proven the utility of wearable tools. However, smaller screens present more issues in terms of prioritizing what to display in such a limited space, while also having all the necessary stuff only a few clicks away.
Furthermore, ignoring the device’s UX and usability in healthcare can sometimes have much more severe implications than users merely navigating an annoying interface. A slightly confusing display of numbers on a common medical device, such as a glucose meter, can lead to deadly mistakes, as shown in this real-life case study, which could’ve been avoided by testing the design on real people beforehand.
The first part of telehealth—remote patient monitoring—allows doctors to keep an eye on their patients remotely, which is useful considering how many people cannot make regular visits for simple checkups but still require continuous observation for their conditions.
Various wearable tech and RPM software have to follow the latest intuitive user experience approaches in healthcare to be effective and not take away much time trying to decipher crucial vitals on screen. Visual simplicity and responsiveness are key factors to consider.
The focus on UX has to revolve around the two most crucial parts of remote patient monitoring tools—a doctor’s dashboard, where medical professionals follow the conditions and treatments of their chronic patients, and the patient’s app, where people can keep up with their own progress and communicate with their physicians.
Telemedicine became one of the hottest trends in the last couple of years and has especially been prominent during the ongoing global pandemic. It presents a valuable opportunity to communicate with medical professionals without the need to visit them in person.
Another side of telehealth also demands new approaches in healthcare UX/UI design to be put together. First of all, those who need this kind of software the most are the older generations, and they are observed to be significantly less tech-savvy than millennials and GenZ, which is why telemedicine tools have to be as simple and as straightforward as possible.
The main challenge with telehealth solutions is that they have to provide an experience that closely resembles a real visit to the doctor while also remaining accessible and inclusive to all social groups.
Both a consumer-focused and friendly design, as well as personalization, are considered crucial aspects of healthcare UX, especially because as high as 95% of people reveal they had many bad experiences in healthcare. Research from Salesforce has shown that areas which experienced the most improvement are texts, SMS, and video chats.
The consumer-focused design has to satisfy every user’s need within sensible limits—that means treating patients as customers. The business aspect of healthcare is now more prominent than ever, and if a person can’t get what they want, they’ll go look for it elsewhere.
The same goes for personalization and meeting people’s expectations. Our era of hyper-personalization leads to numerous challenges of predicting individual behavior and building a relationship with the patient that builds around trust.
As a frequent subject of many futuristic notions from our past, both virtual and augmented reality are now becoming widely-accepted aspects of training, assessing, and testing in healthcare, particularly in more developed regions.
These technological advances can help doctors streamline practicing their skills in a virtual environment instead of having to resolve previous slow and archaic methods. They can also help visualize scan results for more accurate diagnoses.
Notwithstanding the target implementation, most AR and VR user experience challenges lie within the tool’s accuracy and target audience. The former is of the utmost importance and urgency to those running and interpreting tests. The latter is the focus of developers designing either the solutions for distracting patients during procedures or training software.
Despite being one of the latest additions and still going through an early stage of integration into everyday healthcare, AI and chatbots are on their way to becoming the new normal, considering the spread of chatbots in other industries. Bringing AI into the mix can help alleviate tons of routine tasks for both doctors and patients—from booking appointments to other types of regular repetitive interactions.
In these instances, healthcare UX design has the challenge of automating various conversations and tasks while avoiding being obviously robotic while doing it. Personalization and friendly demeanor from a bot may seem like an uphill battle; however, it’s important to remember that every human being wants to feel cared for and understood, which means receiving relevant and thought-out responses.
Not that long ago, loads of former paperwork stacks turned into an equal amount of digitized health records that should also be properly organized and easily accessed, and appropriate and user-friendly navigation is key here.
Accurately utilizing UX design principles can help structure and present tons of patient-related and other medical information in a way that no longer feels overwhelming and confusing; therefore, the information flow in healthcare UX must be extremely hierarchical to be understood quickly.
Another issue to bear in mind when dealing with the design of electronic health records is the need to follow regulations. The process of enforcing them comes through assignments and checklists for each medical worker. The challenge stems from minimizing the time professionals spend in front of a screen and is usually fixed by providing an orderly interface.
Voice user interfaces (VUI) in healthcare UX are getting more attention since the pandemic started due to allowing people to carry out daily tasks without having to touch the device and possibly contaminate themselves with viruses and bacteria.
In healthcare specifically, the challenges of creating and designing these VUIs mean adding the ability to call emergency services, adhering to privacy policies and regulations during voice authentication, having a wide option of relevant commands and responses, all while making sure language is not an obstacle.
Medical UI design is not the only thing that benefits from adding voice recognition. Though not a widespread phenomenon yet, researchers predict the rapid growth of vocal biomarker utilization by the end of this decade. The possibility of diagnosing various illnesses just by listening to a person’s voice can be an exceptional addition to healthcare services.
Ethical healthcare UX design, above all, stands for designing products and services that don’t deviate from the morals and beliefs of your business and you as a righteous individual. Those creating healthcare applications have to bear in mind all the ramifications and the effects they have on real people.
UX also means providing a positive, honest, and inclusive experience for people of all socio-economic groups without resorting to any gimmicks and deception. Ensuring equal treatment in design doesn’t mean a one-size-fits-all mentality but an equally accommodating experience that considers people of all conditions, mental states, cultures, abilities, and demographics
Mental health products and resources, in particular, are another challenge, since you have to carefully evaluate how your solutions may help or possibly exacerbate problems for some users—for example, those with ADHD, anxiety disorders, autism spectrum conditions, depression, etc.
It appears to be a tendency for user experience to become a linchpin and one of the major components of future healthcare services. All of the examples we mentioned in this article will demonstrate a huge increase in global demand and acceptance while also dealing with all the challenges they currently face.
Wearable medical devices, including smartwatches, will continue to be reduced in size while accumulating even more useful features. Chatbots are expected to become less and less bot-like, and virtual reality will become commonplace in even more medical institutions around the globe, even in less affluent areas.
Accessibility and inclusiveness will definitely stop being the last thing on everyone’s minds and agendas when developing and designing a healthcare solution. It’s already seen a positive shift compared to what we had even a decade ago.
The shift from paper-based patient files and the more primitive environment of medical professionals to the variety of high-tech solutions we have today didn’t happen overnight.
While a much more user-centric approach in the digital transformation process is definitely still desired, it’s safe to say that we’re on the right track.
Get in touch if you have any questions or you want to promptly upgrade the UX of your company’s healthcare solutions.
Natalie is a HIPAA-certified expert with high-grade knowledge in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries with 5+ years of experience. She helps CIOs, CTOs of medical organizations, and founders of agile healthtech startups get the most valuable tech solutions for fundamental digital reinforcement in patient care, automation of operational processes, and overall business progress.
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