Product and User Experience Design
Product and User Experience Design
Medic Mobile is the steward of the Community Health Toolkit, which is an open source and highly configurable framework for building apps for health workers that provide care in the world’s hardest-to-reach communities.
Due to the nature of where we work (globally, in LMICs) and the users we serve (low-literacy with limited technological experience), our product design practice has been a unique challenge to build. We use the continuous discovery framework by conducting small and frequent research activities through regular touch-points with users who often have difficulties accessing network connectivity and charging stations for their devices, while also often navigating challenges with language barriers.
We've been able to overcome these challenges on a per-need basis using bespoke methodologies ranging from Medic teammates in-region calling to speak with users directly, field visits and shadowing, to arranging for local research assistants to facilitate user interviews and testing.
The latter requires intensive training, transcriptions and translations and comes with a cost, but one well worth the investment to ensure we’re hearing feedback from users from different health systems and countries, and building equitable solutions.
Our researchers input samples into our user feedback repository, tagged with contextual information including magnitude and frequency. On a quarterly basis, the larger team comes together to run a synthesis and analysis workshop, arranging the recent feedback samples and grouping them into problem statements. This is where we are able to ascertain our most impactful areas of work that align with our organizational strategies and agree on the goals we'd like to achieve.
The team then ideates by story mapping different ways to achieve the agreed upon goal, including the assumptions made for each step of the process. Validating these assumptions before moving forward is key to reduce the risk of building something unsuccessful.
Solution prototypes then get tested across different partners, countries, health systems and personas, using bespoke methodologies mentioned above (but same metrics!) to ensure we are collecting equitable, diverse and inclusive feedback.
Features are iterated on as necessary and deployed with telemetry, keeping our design practice focused on outcomes over outputs.