Redesign of the Mobile App and Web Digital Platform for Saludsa customers
Project Background
Saludsa is a prepaid medicine company in Ecuador. During 2017 they identified the necessity to dispose new tools to their customers, so they could manage the benefits of their health plans in an easier way. With this in mind, they launch the first version of their application and customer web portal, where Saludsa's customer could find tools as scheduling appointments with doctors and medical centers, a refund tool for expenses without copay of the plan. During the time they started adding multiple integrations with external tools to give more benefits.
With this, in the last years, the application became a tool without order, where all the tools were mixed and were difficult to find, that's why we started to work on a redesign of the application and the customers website, focused on what their customers were looking to find and need in this platforms.
Methodologies implemented
Interviews
At the discovery phase of this project, I conducted user interviews in order to get a better understanding of the problem. We focused on understand the actual pains and necessities of all the people involved with the application, external and internal customers, so this tool involve every branch that could be affected with this redesign
1
Why did I choose this research method?
Because I considered that, having in mind that I was just involving with this company, to have interviews will help me to have deeper insights and answers on how the users were feeling and using the previous application and web portal.
2
What were the research questions?
I divided on two focuses for the interviews, internal and external customers:
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Internal Customers:
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Which are your main interactions or impacted areas related to our App and Customers Portal?
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Which have been you main pains realted to the App?
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If you could propose an improvement in the application which would be?
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If you could propose a new feature in the application which would be?
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Which are your favorite features in the application and why?
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Which are your least favorite features on the app and why?
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(Just for service areas:) Which are the main complaints you receive about the app from our customers?
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External Customers:
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Which have been you main pains related to the App?
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If you could propose an improvement for the application which would be?
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If you could propose a new feature in the application which would be?
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Which are your favorite features in the application and why?
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Which are your least favorite features on the app and why?
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3
How many users were interviewed?
I interviewed 10 internal customers and 10 external customers.
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What I was curious the most of the insights I could get?
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To understand the main pain points that external and internal customers could have in common and which were more extremely different.
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Validate the hypothesis that the previous structure of the app and the customer portal was not understandable for users.
5
What were the main insights got from the interviews?
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That the users couldn't find easily the tools they were looking for, and there were others which they didn't understand how to use
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That some tools had to be more friendly to the final user because they didn't understand many technical terms that were used.
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That the actual structure of the application and customer portal was not easy to understand for users.
With this insights we focused on a new structure that could help users to find their tools according to their necessities. This would be more clear on the distribution and new sections. Also we would use more friendly and common terms, in order to make an easier way for users to understand some of the tools that were not used because weren't understood, but were found valuable for the users. Finally, we worked on completely redesigning certain functional flows that were confusing for the user.
Card Sorting Process
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At the beginning, after having some interviews and having identified that we have a clear problem with the previous structure, validating that it was not clear for our users we defined that this methodology could help us to have a path to define on how to organize information and even the names for some features that were confusing. For this activity the methodology was Online Closed Cardsorting.
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When participant started grouping information, we identified that was focused on the type of necessity they had. Ex: If they were looking for doctors, maybe something related to hospitalization or even related to online or home services.
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Focused on this the navigation structure was divided in 5 sections
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First, a home space where users could find the main things they were looking to
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Second, all the medical tools, which were presented divided by kind of necessity
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Third, all the contact channels and non medical services
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Fourth, an space for notifications about promotions and their plan
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Fifth, everthing related to the contractual information and benefits of their plan.
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This activity was crucial to design a better solution to the distribution of the information, based on direct feedback of our users.
User Flow and Information Architecture
During this process I started to work with our development team to identify our technical advantages and limitations to identify risks that could appear in the design process and which things were possible to propose. Later, I start working on the user flow and the information architecture based with the outputs of the interviews and the card sorting, having a logical step by step of what was the necessity of our customer and all the options and features that could find aligned to it.
During this stage I worked side by side with the architect and the backend developers of the team to validate that the flow and information was possible with how the services were built and to align them on which services can they start to identify for the development process.
Wireframes
At the beginning of my design process I created wireframes for testing purposes so we can test different options with our users and don't wait to have everything with our final UI, but focused on identifying improvement oppotunities, without having done to much effort. We worked on low fidelity prototipes, without having the final components, trying this prototypes on Figma and Adobe XD.
Finally we had 3 iterations on defining the final flow for the App and Customer website.
User Testing
Before launching the product, I did 3 testing rounds, in different points of the designing process in order to reveal possible usability problems. We tried to have clear if we had understood the pains and gave a proper solution, and also to redesign the features we had more issues according to this feedback. In every testing we tried to have two options (A/B testing) to identify which options were closer to what the users were looking.
Our test subjects were real users, external and internal clients of the company. We made tests with average users and also extreme users which made more valuable insights to certain points we didn't considered previously.
The activity was moderated and due to the COVID-19 situations had to be remote.
UI Design
Once all usability mistakes were tested out in wireframes, I started designing the final screens in Adobe XD. This part of the work was done in team with the company Trade Ecuador, which helped us on the design system we used as base for the final design.
This design was for App (IOS and Android) and Web.
This screen was focused on give access to customers and also to a Freemium plan for non customers.
Home with access to the favorite functions that are more used by customers and a Nav Bar to give access to all the funtionalities.
The screen shows the menu with the profile information of the customer and options related to their plan.
This screen was focused on give access to customers and also to a Freemium plan for non customers.
Our
Results
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This was the most challenging project in my professional experience, because were two huge platforms and I was afraid that we couldn't give a proper solution for the pains we identified, but we have a pretty good acceptance of our users.
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This was my second time working in a project as UI Designer, so I was afraid that the goal wasn't achieved, but to have support and a proper team, was the key for our results.
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The phrase "Don't get in love about your solution, but get in love of the problem" in UX is real, when you are designing, maybe you could get biased, but you have to have clear what is the problem and that you won't have every time the final solution, but you have to keep iterating and having clear why you are doing this. This will lead you to the proper solution.