What was my role?

Product Designer

Who did I work with?

Uday Kiran Kavaturu (Sr. Business Analyst); Siva (Product Designer, NH); Austin Wrenn (Director of Tech., NH)

What did I work on?

UX Design, UI Design, Motion Design, Prototyping, Research

What did I learn?

Design for accessibility, Limitations in UWP Framework, Business Models, Product Execution

What tools did I use?

Google (for Secondary Research), Sketch (for UI Design), Invision (for Prototyping), Zeplin (for design hand-off)

According to a survey by the Better Hearing Institute, hearing loss negatively impacts household income on average up to $12,000 per year. The use of hearing aids mitigates that loss by as much as 50 percent.

Virtual Care: digital chat experience

To reach wider audience and help them, Nations Hearing aims to build a telehealth solution called Virtual Care for people with hearing disabilities. The Virtual Care solution is integrated with their existing NH Digital Hearing Center platform using which customers can quickly seek help through audio, video or chat for completing hearing tests or even book an appointment with expert doctors nearby.

NH-Digital Hearing Center is an application that is being used on different platforms in different ways. It is used:

As a public kiosk,
As a self-assessment device at a hospital,
As a web application that can be accessed by people across the world.

problem statement

For patients

Most patients who use Digital Hearing Center would successfully complete the test and get their reports, but they were not sure about how serious their hearing loss is and whom to approach.
For novice and patients aged above 40 who are not so tech savy, it is difficult to understand Digital Hearing Center interface, and leads to depending on others to perform the test, which is not comfortable for most of the patients.

For Nations Hearing

Patients are happy with the Digital Hearing Center and getting the free reports, whereas Nations Hearing is having a hard time to get details from the patients for further sales activities, which results in increase in marketing costs with poor sales.

constraints

Cannot mark patient details forms as mandatory as they might leave the platform with privacy concerns.
Only 30% of screen real-estate was allotted for Virtual Care chat experience, while the other 70% is occupied by hearing test.
Critical technical limitations from UWP framework for implementing motion design.
Collaboration with remote product team(Nations Hearing) for feedback.
No interaction with actual users for design validation and testing.

design approach

No dish has the same recipe. Similarly, not every problem has the same solution. To acheive the right solution we need a right design process defined for the given problem statement. Here, we have defined following process for delivering the design solution.

This includes...

Constant collaboration, shareout and feedback with Product team
Rapid and iterative prototyping to aid Development efforts
Daily scrum to align with cross platform teams

design and solution

To help both patients and Nations Hearing, we thought of allowing patients to connect with experts through Audio, Video or Chat interfaces from Digital Hearing Center interface. This would help patients with tests, reports or even scheduling an appointment with expert health care providers and helps Nations Hearing with collecting necessary details of patients before each session.

#Scenario 1

Patient might be using this portal from a public kiosk.

#Scenario 2

Patient might be using this portal from a self-assessment device at a hospital.

#Scenario 3

Patient might be using this portal from their personal computer using browser.

Nations Hearing aims to build a telehealth solution called Virtual Care for people with hearing disabilities. The Virtual Care solution is integrated with their existing hearing test platform using which customers can quickly seek help through audio + video calls or chat to complete hearing tests.

Also, there was a scenario where users and agents might want to exchange messages or reference links during a voice/video call. To make this possible an action to “open chat” is provided in an ongoing call screen. To enhance the experience we even added full screen mode where virtual care window stretched to full screen to avail the facilty of exchanging messages without sacrificing video.