Medit reached out Pixelmatters with a content problem at hand — information in the healthcare industry was being released online at a high speed. Our doctors were struggling to keep up-to-date and sometimes recurring to unreliable sources of information.
The cure was simple — design a next-generation app that would change how the medical community curated their content online. Healthcare professionals would select reliable online information for other healthcare professionals, encouraging peer-to-peer learning, and ultimately collaboration.
Even though this was a simple idea, we knew how challenging designing this product would be. The first challenge was the industry. Healthcare is on its own an industry that involves many technical terms with which none of us was familiarised.
Not only we would be taping into a complex market such as Healthcare, but we would also be designing for a very diverse and demanding user-base, where many are not tech-savvy. We started by examining the initial brief.
We made sure the requirements in the brief were clear, the concepts objective and, above all, we understood the end-user well, because that would be at the heart of our design decisions.
With a detailed brief, we had access to all of the information we needed for the design decisions we would be making next. The brief included details about the target audience, their behaviors, background, competitors, and what were the intended monetization strategies. This gave us a solid base to work with and start uncovering how we could connect their business goals, the product, and a user-centric approach.
After an in-depth analysis of their products and a benchmark of the different competitors, it was time to learn all the different medical concepts, an important step before putting any pixel in place.
Together with Medit defined what each concept meant, it's naming, what it aimed to achieve, and how it had to be communicated to the target audience, healthcare professionals. This allowed us to have a broader picture of how everything should be connected, and ultimately how the final user experience should be experienced.
There was one thing the App needed to be — accessible to those with little to no tech background, to whom reaching well-curated should feel simple and logical.
But it also needed to keep the typical app user, engaged. The flow, structure, and communication had to guarantee users from these two different groups felt confident but also engaged when interacting with the App.
Although Medit already had a logo and a set of primary colors, its Look&Feel was yet to be defined. We wanted the app to feel reliable, but familiar, especially considering the target audience we were working with, which would test the initial version of the design later on.
We started defining a set of keywords that needed to reflect our initial thoughts for the direction of the apps' look — health, safety, reliability, and trustworthiness. The blue and green tones perfectly translated those keywords. They intensified a sense of security and reliability —exactly what the app needed to represent.
While we strived to guarantee the design felt fresh, we knew it shouldn’t fall too far off when it came to navigation patterns.
It was essential that users felt they knew what they were doing and every behavior was expected. As a native iOS App, we tried to guarantee recognizable patterns to make sure we guided users in the right direction.
To ease the user's learning curve and facilitate access to the most relevant information, the inclusion of a filtering and categorization system was discussed with the client very early on. This would help users get to the content they were looking for quickly, providing less friction and more reading time.
As a way to further push this, we crafted a way to have users choose their favorite categories once they installed the app, dictating what they would see on the first experience. Medit would then learn with their likes to constantly evolve with the reading habits.
Since our target audience mostly included non-tech-savvy users, we needed to define a good onboarding strategy that would not only guide them through the App but would also explain early on what they could expect at every step.
A contextual tip approach was put in place, defining what information would be presented to the user, when, and how. This helped us set the stage for a clear first experience with the App.
As with any product, Medit followed an MVP approach opting for launching with the core features, leaving a few initially planned features out. But we made sure that it had all the necessary variables in place for the future.
Considering Medit's roadmap and future releases, the design had to be scalable enough to easily accommodate growth, but, at the same time, slowly introduce their users to future concepts, simplifying the user's learning curve sooner rather than later.
After the release of their app, Medit continues to discover new ways to curate medical information online, whether through Spotify or Netflix, through the use of technology and innovation.
Medit is not just helping healthcare professionals find reliable medical content online. They are facilitating knowledge sharing on a large scale, driving a future where Healthcare and Technology work hand-in-hand. Because it's only when we combine innovation, digital, and worldwide collaboration that tomorrow is assured.
