Overview

When people think about digital healthcare, the most common feature people think of is probably telemedicine. Noteworth did that but also much more. As a sort of complementary feature to telemedicine, I was tasked to design the messenger tool.

When we won Geisinger as a client, they were presented with a set of promised features that would be integrated into their package. Features that were not yet built, but already had preliminary mockups of what they could expect on the desktop side. This is what the preliminary design for messenger looked like before I was assigned:

The “Research”

Unfortunately, the only “user interviews” I was able to do was with the CEO, who did all the communication with Geisinger.

Ideally, I would’ve been able to ask questions, but was only given feedback from the CEO telling me what “they” wanted.

Some non-negotiable items were:

• Ability to chat internally with care teams about a given patient

• Ability to chat with patients directly

• Both a global and patient-facing inbox with the ability to favorite specific threads or patients

• Send attachment feature for both clinicians and patients

Competitive analysis

After my initial conversations, I did some initial research on what other messaging platforms are out there, both direct and indirect competitors that utilize messaging, as well as inbox platforms, including Mail, Gmail, Outlook, etc…

It was easy to find indirect competitors: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Hangouts, etc… but it was really difficult to find any clinician-focused messaging examples at the time. 

There were obvious common themes throughout the experiences, so I tried to utilize what I thought worked.

Design exploration

Because of a looming deadline, I, unfortunately, did not have the time to do lo-fi wireframes. But we had a well-developed design system already in place which made it easy to utilize as much as possible to create a few iterations of the clinician messaging experience.

The first versions were a little bit quick and dirty, but that’s because of unclear direction and pain points. I had to design around ambiguous instruction. Not only did I design one or two iterations based on the initial mockup, but I also designed a few experiences separating the patient and care team conversations.

Curveball

I was told after the first internal presentation that none of these were right. 

I was told that we needed to separate the conversations that happen with a patient and internal care teams, but they could NOT be separated experiences or pages. They had to somehow show both so they can cross reference messages.

Confused? I was too. But eventually, we finally got it right. 

For our first real presentation with Geisinger, we provided a desktop and mobile prototype with primary tasks to complete, as well as a PDF of some of the available features in messaging.

• Clinician's primary task: send a new conversation to Peter about his joint pain

• Patient’s primary task: send your clinician a new message

QA + Internal Testing

After the initial build, Noteworth employees got to test the messenger! We got some really great feedback on how to further improve both the design and overall experience.

Here are some of the notes we got:

• Can’t click on global inbox line items

• Photo sent from iPhone is distorted and cropped

• Spacing is very off

• Hover states aren’t working

• How do I save an edited subject?

• The organization of conversations isn’t clear

• Message preview doesn’t update

• The patient inbox list is hard to scan