OpenMed is a healthcare product that gathers all medical information of a patient, making it easy and secure to be consulted and shared. It was the project that made me realize I wanted to pursue a career in Interaction Design.
In 2016 I was hired by a doctor who was building an online medical system to "make the screens of the mobile app look nice". At that point, OpenMed already had a beta version of its desktop app. The product was indeed very interesting, addressing important issues experienced by most stakeholders involved (patients, doctors, clinics/labs, and healthcare companies), by presenting a variety of features.
What I realized was that the biggest contribution
I could make to the project was not simply designing the mobile UI, but first redesigning the product information architecture and user conceptual model. All the features were thrown to the product without much care about the users' experience.
There were basically 8 sections/features that could be condensed into 4. And these 4 could be divided into 2 main sections, which were:
PROFILE; with all the patient's medical records and general account information;
CLINIC; with the remaining features (Exams, Appointments, Prescriptions, and Doctors).
With this major change in the way of organizing the product's features, I was able to design the mobile app UI based on two main tabs (Profile and Clinic). Some other challenges included:
Designing an interface that would encourage users to complete their profile, by showing them how much is missing.
Create visual hierarchy in a way it's easy for users to quickly find the information they are looking for (in the Profile tab). Also, because the Profile tab contains too much sections, a quick-menu floating button was added.
Design a consistent visual system, that indicates that similar features work in similar ways (e. g. Exams and Prescriptions having an overall similar look since they work in similar ways).
Conclusion
At the time of this project, my skills and knowledge about Interaction Design were not developed yet and there are many things I would have done differently in this project. But understanding the difference between "making the screens look nice" and redesigning how people interact with a system is what made me realized I wanted to pursue a career in Interaction Design, by combining my Visual Design background with the skills to understand users, systems, and design experiences, that I would develop in the following years.
The biggest takeaway that I got from this project was to really understand the designer role in an interaction design project, which goes way beyond the aesthetics added at the end of a process. Good products, services, and experiences have designers involved in every part of the process, from conducting research and framing the problem, to the final, pixel-perfect visual designs.