Healthcare Appointment System

Design assumptions & challenges

Assumptions

• That both patients and hospital administrators are tech-savvy enough to adapt to and benefit from an online appointment booking system.
• The assumption that hospitals possess the necessary infrastructure, including reliable internet access to consistently and effectively utilize the Afya.AI system for day-to-day operations.

Challenges

• Variability in hospital preferences regarding appointment scheduling, such as preferring number assignments over time slots due to doctor schedule unpredictability, required thoughtful consideration and adaptation during design.
  
• Each hospital operated with a different internal management system, leading to hesitation among some institutions to integrate Afya.AI as a secondary system.

— Step 01

Connecting with users

In order to understand my users, I conducted thorough user research. I applied the contextual inquiry method, immersing myself in the hospital environment and closely observing the various methods employed by hospitals to facilitate appointment bookings. Additionally, I conducted user interviews with patients  to learn about their booking experiences and hospital admins to learn how they manage appointments.

Who are we targeting with this solution?

After analyzing the research, I created two user personas who represent the two groups that make up the core of the user base. The user personas below include the diverse perspectives, challenges and goals of these groups, guiding the design decisions and solutions throughout this project.

— Step 02

Ideation & exploration

When coming with up with the design solution, I closely observed the user’s existing systems and integrated valuable insights gathered from extensive user research. This enabled me to come up with the following feature list, which directly addresses the user's paintpoints.

Information architecture

Patient dashboard

To enhance user-friendliness, I came up with an information architecture that allows patients to freely explore the search functionality and view hospitals and doctors available without signing in first. Users will only need to sign in to book an appointment.

Hospital dashboard

The most important thing for the hospital admin is to easily view incoming appointment requests, accept/decline them and quickly edit doctor schedules. I put this into consideration when establishing the information architecture and made sure all these functionalities will be available directly from the homepage.

— Step 03

High-Fidelity design

I designed the high fidelity designs to showcase a modern and intuitive interface that prioritizes user engagement and accessibility. I incorporated neat typography, a harmonious color scheme, responsiveness and clear visual hierarchy to ensure that users can effortlessly access essential features and information.

Hospital admin's dashboard

Admins can add, edit and remove doctor details from their hospital profile

Admins can view appointment in calendar view and filter by doctor, date or department.

Admins can manage a doctor’s schedule for accurate bookings.

Admins can modify any hospital related information such as services provided and insurance accepted

mobile responsiveness

— Step 04

Feedback from users

During the design process, we worked together with hospitals to continuously test the designs to make sure they meet our users needs. I made the following changes based on the that feedback.

• Some hospitals, still preferred assigning numbers vs time slots due to the unpredictability of the doctor's schedule, so I added the number slot option. Hospitals can choose to operate on the time slot option or assigned numbers.

• The landing page didn't have much information on how AFYA.AI works, so I redesigned the landing page to highlight the system's features and benefits for both patients and hospitals
  

next steps

Continous improvement

• Continuously collecting feedback from both patients and hospitals to ensure that the solution remains responsive to the evolving needs of its users.