Product and User Experience Design
Product and User Experience Design
Medic Mobile is a non-profit organization on a mission to advance good health and human flourishing for and with the hardest-to-reach communities.
The Community Health Toolkit’s core framework is built and stewarded by Medic Mobile. It’s a highly configurable open source software platform that makes it easier to build scalable digital health apps.
It’s often used by Community Health Workers (CHWs) to deliver equitable care.
One of Medic’s goals as an organization is to increase care activities provided by CHWs. The directly linked product goal is to ensure high CHW task and reporting completion rates.
Our Research & Learning team had been consistently reporting a high coverage rate of households and yet low rates of overall task completion.
To gain insight into this issue we conducted user interviews with health workers and found that one of the major pain points for CHWs across counties was the distance of their patients homes from each other, as well as their own. These distances sometimes spanned up to 20km apart.
The way tasks were designed in the Community Health Toolkit to promote equitable care was to sort them by priority according to the clinical urgency and relevance to the assessment’s report summary and follow up procedures.
This design however does not take into account the CHW effort of traveling between households. For example, the CHT app may send a CHW to one household with an urgent task, then to another urgent task – potentially 20km away – before sending them back to the first household to complete a task with regular urgency.
In order to increase task completion rates, I designed two potential solutions and presented them to our project partners and CHWs through usability sessions:
The first option was to give CHWs more control of their task list view. They would be easily able to sort their tasks by priority and also by household name.
Using the existing design pattern for sorting, the primary use case of this design is for the scenario where a CHW may be in a specific village or catchment area and want to find tasks for nearby households.
The second design option doesn’t offer the same level of visibility to family-related tasks, however it is a much more seamless experience for CHWs to complete all available tasks within the household of the patient they are currently assessing.
Once the CHW completes the most urgent task on their list, they are taken to an interstitial page where they can directly access the tasks for those living in the same household instead of being returned to the app’s main task page.
Although CHWs know their households intimately and by name, we received feedback that the learning curve to utilize the first proposed design would be too steep for most users and that expensive group retraining would be required.
Due to the lower tech literacy rates of CHWs, we opted to implement the second design. Although it allows less user control, it ended up being a much friendlier user experience for our target audience.
Initial results have shown an increase of care activities of up to 35% across test sites in Kenya.