CASE STUDY
MNERVA Case Study
June-August 2022
Prompt
Role: Researcher, Brand Director, UX Designer, UI Designer
In the Unversity of Wisconsin Digital Skills: UI/UX Bootcamp, my team of four was challenged with creating a User Experience that "Designs For Good," an experience that ethically improves the human experience. We decided to focus on finding health care. Most work was completed in Figma.
Problem Statement
Patients seeking new care providers are confused by the mismatch between their needs and overwhelming number of provider options.
Research
For this project, there were two parts to research. First was to look at our potential competitors, and conduct a competitive analysis. Then, we conducted User Interviews with 12 unique users.
Competitive Analysis
We analyzed Zoc Doc, Nex Health, Google Maps, and Web MD Care. Overall weakness was incomplete information with incomplete clinic profiles. Competitors regularly had pay-to-list services for clinics as well
Accessibility
All sites overwhelmingly passed NNG Usability Heuristic Evaluation, with the exception of "Help and Documentation." This was the least successful heuristic on all sites.
Project Flow
User Inteviews
We conducted 12 user interviews for users who:
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Live in the USA
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Are above the age of 18 (ages ranged from 23-82)
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Are responsible for their own health provider choices
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Found healthcare providers in the last year.
Some of our Questions
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Can you walk me through the steps of how you found a medical provider- starting with when you first knew you would need one?
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On a scale of 1-10, 10 being excellent, how was your experience with this process of finding a provider?
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How much time do you spend on finding a new health care provider?
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What were your frustrations and pleasures when finding a provider?
All interviewees had unique experiences with varying health insurance. However, our data skewed towards College-Educated users, though there were users with less education as well. Our data does not fully represent American Diversity. Our data skews toward White, Native American, and Asian users.
Synthesis
With these 12 interviews, my group and I worked together to put together an affinity map in a Figjam. Some key insights were:
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Current systems do not align with patients' actual coverage and time-sensitive needs.
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Online systems have inaccurate information on availability and coverage
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Patients value trust when it comes to medical providers
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Patients want a transparent end-to-end experience.
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There are multiple factors why patients choose a doctor (e.g Location, Experience, and demographics of the provider).
From our User Interviews, we created 4 unique personas of the common user searching for healthcare. They are Barabara, a widowed retiree with Medicare and supplemental insurance, Linda, the administrative assistant on Medicaid, Gabe, the research assistant on his own private insurance for the first time, and George, the construction business owner who is uninsured. Two of our personas, Barbara and Gabe were then incorporated into journey maps, and one persona, Linda into an empathy map.
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Wireframe & Prototype
Referring to our user interviews and our synthesized personas, the journey map, we ideated solutions on a thought map. The best solution–besides overall policy change to our healthcare system–was to create a well-thought-out healthcare search system that was transparent on a provider's accepted insurance, availability, and location. Also, we wanted to incorporate a more streamlined search system, with an advanced & curated filtering system.
We then created a happy-path task flow to guide our page design and content.
User Testing
Our goal was to determine which features of the Mnerva website mid-fidelity prototype created a successful, efficient and trustworthy experience for finding a primary care physician. And which features are subtracted to the ultimate goal of the experience.
We each conducted moderated in-person usability tests of each other's prototypes and gained qualitative and some quantitative feedback. There were 10 tests total.
User Task
Find a primary care provider with mental health specialty and make a Wellness appointment for January 2nd at 9:15 am.
Overall Feedback
To all four prototypes presented the overall feedback was:
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9 out of 10 users were able to find a doctor and make an appointment
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On average, users felt 7.81 (out of 10) on the likeliness to use a product
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Trust was rated at 8.2 (out of 10 )
Key Insights to my Prototype
Opportunities
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The layout was simple and straightforward.
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Navigation was fluid and easy to follow.
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The filter system worked great.
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The doctor profile was valued greatly
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Add option to provide additional details for visit
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Add more navigation components
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Make filtering more obvious in the design
Brand & Style
Before preparing the high-fidelity design, establishing the brand and style of the product is necessary.
Inspiration
Mnerva is named after the Roman Goddess of Knowledge and Health, Menerva. The logo that I created represents these origins by accenting the M in Mnerva with 3 olive leaves and an olive. Additionaly, we wanted our brand and style to convey the following keywords: Trustworthy, Reassuring, Friendly, and Empowering. To maintain modernity, we wanted our typeface to be sans-serif.
Color Logo
Icon
This is the final logo and icon. The mint and green colors evoke the feeling of trust and innovation. The sans serif font used, Trebuchet MS is very legible and modern.
Additional colors in our brand are a lighter mint for contrast and our Secondary Colors: olive-blue, red, and yellow. These colors were tested against each other to pass WCAG color contrast guidelines.
Using the created brand guide, we then developed style tiles on Text, Buttons, Icons and more.
Iteration & High-Fidelity Design
Solving for the weaknesses and opportunities established from User Testing, I applied changes to the mid-fidelity design, like on the Results Page, creating an edit search button, a more prominent Filtering button, and on the Confirmation page, added an "Export-to-Calendar" and "Get-Directions" links.
Next, I applied the styles, components, and buttons defined in the Brand and Style Guide to my mid-fidelity, transforming it into a Highfidelity Prototype.
Conclusion
Finding healthcare is hard, and if developed, Mnerva can help ease the patient experience in today's complicated healthcare environment.
We confirmed that users want a better experience finding healthcare.
In testing our prototypes, the overwhelming response was "I want this!" With a strong and consistent style guide and good-practice Interface Design, Mnerva is Trustworthy, Reassuring, Friendly, and Empowering.