Healthcare eCommerce
During my time at Change Healthcare, I helped lead research and design efforts for a new healthcare eCommerce solution. The product release is scheduled for later this year, but you can view the media release here.
The Challenge
How healthcare eCommerce can benefit everyone.
User Research
Insights from real people.
Design Considerations
Integrating both technical and research requirements.
The Product
A showcase of final screens.
The Challenge
For most people, the healthcare industry is a complicated web of systems to navigate and challenges to overcome. Instead of having experiences similar to other industries, like shopping through an app, or purchasing an airline ticket, healthcare consumers are often forced to navigate multiple patient portals, make phone calls to understand their bills or depend on fax machines in a digital world. Payments, bills, and healthcare finances, in particular, cause a great deal of friction. Both healthcare consumers and providers suffer when the system breaks down and medical bills go unpaid.
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The goal of this project was to help healthcare providers (doctor offices, hospital networks, clinics, etc.) give their patients a way to predict healthcare costs, plan for them, and pay for them in advance.
User Research
The first step in our research process was to leverage previous insights from related projects. Exploratory research I had led in Florida only a few months prior to this project confirmed the firm desire of healthcare consumers to more easily find care, have price transparency, understand payment options, and much more.
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Most compellingly, interviewees told us that the unpredictability of medical costs meant that they could not actively plan how they were going to pay for care and thus could not figure it into their budgeting system.
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By providing price transparency and the option to prepay for care, this product would help anyone who needed to save for a procedure and didn't want to deal with complicated bills after receiving care, likely during recovery.
Using what we already knew as a jumping-off point, I began to create the first wireframes and lo-fi prototype screens of the eCommerce platform. As the team built out a tool that would be most desirable to healthcare consumers, we communicated often with our product and engineering teams to weigh the viability and feasibility of each feature.
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Knowing the importance of early feedback to inform the design, another UXer, joined in, and together we finished a draft version of the product to use for user testing. Over three days, my teammate and I interviewed eight participants who gave us invaluable information about if, how, why, and when they would use or find value in the tool we created.
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After our interviews, we sorted and analyzed our findings. Through our work, we developed an idea of who might get the most out of the product, how people want information about a healthcare eCommerce platform to be delivered, and what essential pieces were missing.
For conferences and external share-outs we developed six key insights that could apply beyond our product and company.
Design Considerations
In creating a healthcare eCommerce platform from scratch, there were bound to be a few items to take into account.
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As we created higher fidelity prototypes, it was essential we keep open communication with the product and development teams. The entire team needed to know how long different features might take to implement and if they required additional data we were not able to collect for the MVP. Using our knowledge of the healthcare consumer and weighing time/effort concerns, my teammate and I helped guide the team on what was essential for the MVP and what could wait for future development.
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Another important factor was "white labeling" or designing in a way that a provider could customize the eCommerce platform with their brand. Our research showed that this was a key way to indicate to a consumer that the product was trustworthy. I created an example brand, Example Medical, that became a useful demonstration tool throughout the project.
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Finally, this eCommerce product needed to accommodate users on any device so it was designed with three breakpoints, meaning we considered how each screen should appear on desktop, tablet, and mobile.
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Above are a few samples of the Example Medical brand assets.
