Healthcare UX best practices: Part 2

Crafting a meaningful and intuitive experience for medical professionals can be quite a demanding task.

In my previous newsletter, I mentioned that the healthcare sector is somewhat stuck in obsolescence due to political and corporate strongholds, which means that medical workers can struggle to adopt new approaches and technologies due to their reliance on legacy systems and practices.

Therefore, creating an experience that is “good enough” simply might not cut it for most institutions and medical professionals since there is so much friction toward tech adoption.

Naturally, we ask ourselves, “What can a product offer to satisfy a medical worker’s needs and stimulate adoption?.”

We have a few suggestions.

Context-orientedness

It’s fair to assume that a multidisciplinary team might struggle with developing a product for medical workers without an in-depth understanding of their workflow and needs. Healthcare design should revolve around the clinical practice and the people.

In order to get a better understanding of a medical professional’s experience, we strongly suggest investing extra time into user?research methods?like surveys, focus groups, interviews, observations,?contextual inquiries, and task analysis.

Once the design team acquires a better understanding of their needs, prototypes can be developed and, more importantly, tested via workshops, user investigations, informal scenarios, and focus groups that would allow designers to understand whether the present solution actually addresses user needs.

Data visualization

Data visualization is an often-overlooked parameter of healthcare design, which is really unfortunate considering how much value it provides.

By presenting data in a meaningful and informative manner, medical workers can extract crucial takeaways, find patterns and correlations, and, as a result, make their work more efficient and productive.

According to a peer-reviewed study?published in JMIR Human Factors,?“the benefits of data visualizations—support understanding, task completion, and decision-making—are especially critical in health-related settings such as cancer care facilities.”

When applied correctly, data can help medical personnel make critical and time-sensitive decisions. Designing better data visualization literally helps save lives by allowing intensive care unit clinicians to diminish their cognitive load and facilitate decision-making.

However, it’s also essential to underline that the way data is presented to the user should also be taken into account. Having access to a lot of data can be exceptionally valuable, but overwhelming users with it can hinder their success.

AI and machine learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are an extension of leveraging data in order to improve both the efficiency and the experience of a product designed for medical workers. By processing and analyzing large data sets, machine learning technology can help medical staff identify clear solutions to the problems of individual patients.

More importantly, this technology can be used for its predictive capabilities, which will invariably lead to helping doctors warn patients about necessary lifestyle changes, and having these functionalities onboard will, without a doubt, help skyrocket adoption.

Plus, there’s also a significant business case to incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning functionalities in your healthcare product—it is projected that this type of technology can cut annual US healthcare costs?by $150 billion in 2026

The bottom line

While the healthcare industry is in dire need of improvement from a user experience standpoint, simply bringing UX expertise to the field won’t cut it. Designers should invest a considerable amount of time into both research and?testing?to ensure that the medical personnel’s needs are adequately met.

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