Overview

Most college students are busy and rarely keep up with their medical obligations. I sought out to understand how college students are able to keep up to date with these obligations while in school.

I went in with the hypothesis that college students rarely keep up to date with their health due to lack of an understanding of what is allowed by their insurance providers and lack of time.
With this in mind, we dived into a series of research to understand the main problems that college students faced

USER RESEARCH

With the goal in mind and curious to find out how students went about issues pertaining their health, we (a group of four students and I) carried out contextual interviews in order to ensure the users comfortability since healthcare is a sensitive issue.

Main goal of the contextual interviews was to determine what aspects of the participants’ health care are inadequate and the aspects with which they are content. Specifically asked about availability of health insurance, healthcare, and information on both.The questions were aimed at finding the areas where our participants felt confident and the places they felt uncomfortable in the healthcare process.

The interview participants were Cornell university students in their late teens and early twenties from diverse backgrounds.

FINDINGS

The participants shared about their healthcare experience both at Cornell and their hometowns. Surprisingly enough most students admitted to neglecting their health once they got to school. They admitted to having difficulty when it came to keeping up to date with all their health responsibilities. From the information gathered, we placed details from our activity notes into an affinity diagram.

The themes noted among the participants included not only complaints but also appreciations in four main categories with regard to healthcare:

• Affordability and accessibility

• Doctor visits

• Scheduling

• Access to healthcare information

The main reason that people did not go to the doctor was not because they did not want to but it was because:

1. They couldn’t afford the healthcare options present

2. They didn’t have the time to do so with their busy schedules

3. They didn’t have access to the specific doctors that they needed to see

4. They didn’t have enough health care information to prompt them to make the visits.

AFFINITY DIAGRAM AND STORYBOARD

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM SPACE

Persona

1. Requirements

Once we understood the users and their current frustrations, we translated the analysis of the user research into a summary of what the users want, need and value and what the system we would come up with would need to support.

2. Tasks Model

We modeled the tasks that would be supported by the potential system using a hierarchical task inventory model. The model focusses on activities being done in the system, not presenting users and interactions between them.

The overarching goal of many users was to better manage their healthcare experience. The model identifies the subsections of the user goals more in depth than otherwise would have been possible by transitioning from big tasks, to sub-tasks and finally to individual tasks.

DESIGN PHASE

We moved to the design phase, where we came up with a persona in order to design with the persona in mind.

Using the persona and the story board, we chose to do an all inclusive app that had features relevant to the persona. We carried out a brainstorming session in which we put all the ideas we had on a board and kept crossing out irrelevant ones and grouping similar ideas.

After voting on ideas relevant to the persona, we narrowed the focus areas to ones that were really important to the user:

1. The user requires to access affordable care

2. The user needs to access specialty doctors

3. The user is busy and would like to have a way to easily schedule appointments as well as vaccine appointments.

4. The user would also like to be able to find necessary resources and information on self care.

Interaction Consideration

1. Minimalistic design

• The app is made in such a way that a lot of information is not thrown at the user. Users can navigate through each functionality easily and conveniently.

2. Division of different tasks

• Different goals that the persona needs to meet are split into separate tabs such that the user only accessess the functionalities.

Final Design Decision

We chose to do an all inclusive app that had features relevant to the persona.

The app consists of three main functionalities:

• Scheduling and syncing with other calendars — meets the user’s need to be able to schedule appointments and be reminded of them.

• Preventative and self care tips — meets the user’s need to be able to take care of themselves and have necessary information needed.

• Affordable care and specialty doctor locator — meets the user’s needs to have access to affordable care and specialty doctors.

PROTOTYPES

Used Balsamiq, Invision and AdobeXD for the prototypes

Conclusion

MediGoGo allows young people without much prior experience caring for their own health care needs to control the most important aspects of their health with a low cost solution in the form of a mobile application. The aim is to provide university students without much disposable income the ability to access proper preventative care and medical advice.
During the research, it became apparent a newfound independence, lack of time, and lack of knowledge were the causes of young people neglecting formal healthcare. Therefore, MediGoGo is designed with these underlying problems in mind.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

Most important lesson from this project is the importance of narrowing down the people problem and tackling  that specific user need