AHS CaseStudy
AHS CaseStudy
Feature update for Alberta Health Services
Background
Alberta Health Services (AHS) is proud to be part of Canada’s first and largest provincewide, integrated health system, responsible for delivering health services to more than 4.5 million people living in Alberta, as well as occasionally to some residents of other provinces and territories. Programs and services are offered at more than 900 facilities throughout the province, including hospitals, clinics, continuing care facilities, cancer centres, mental health facilities and community health sites.
Role
I was responsible for user research and user experience design. I conducted interviews to uncover potential hinderances to selecting the best urgent care unit for users’ emergency needs.
User Research
Interview
To get started, potential users were asked a few questions about their journey to the emergency to understand their needs better. The goal was to understand the reasons for the growing pains of patients’ visit to the emergency unit/urgent care unit in Alberta, Canada as well as understand the ways design can alleviate some of these frustrations. One of the interviewees expressed their pains as follows:
“I had to drive a long distance only to wait for so long”
Three key takeaways from the interview:
1. Users could not easily determine the distance of emergency units from their location.
2. Location had to be reselected each time the estimated emergency department wait times was refreshed.
3. Users struggled to reconcile the wait times experienced in the urgent care unit (this is beyond this design scope).
Ideation
At this stage, there was a lot of brainstorming and a few ideas aimed at resolving the issues that were discovered during the interactions with the users at the interview stages. The top three ideas were:
1. Make the use of maps more straightforward by including clickable links.
2. Restrict the refresh of wait times to the preselected location.
3. Provide the option of enabling precise location.
Task Flow
Design & Implementation
This stage started off with a focus on functionality and ease of use while also including some interface details for more clarity for the seamless completion of the task. This enabled the rapid testing and improvement of ideas before moving on to completion.
Clickable contact and address. This redirect users to the destination of intent quickly and easily. It improves both accessibility and response to emergency. In cases of emergency, the less the clicks, the better.
User Testing, Feedback & Iteration
The design was tested with some users. Based on the observation and feedback from users, some of the key updates made are as follows:
Include distance from location: While testing the design, one of the question were “can the distance to the urgent care unit be seen at first glance”. This influenced the addition of distance to the section with wait times. This addition also reduced the amount of clicks required with regards to information about the distance to urgent care facilities.
Include the option of selecting precise location: To improve distance estimation, it was necessary to include an option for precise location. Only upon selecting precise location is the estimated time for arrival for each urgent care unit shown from the closest to the farthest.
The Hi-Fi MockUps
The general theme of the website was maintained as the design followed the brand guidelines.
Takeaway
A key part of designing products is interacting with the users. Relying on assumptions of possible solutions is never enough. The designed was tailored to improve the users’ experience and help achieve their goals more efficiently in the following ways:
1. Eliminate manual typing of phone numbers into call log to rice the emergency unit lines.
2. Automate redirection of address to preferred map for easy access to directions.
3. Distance preview to the urgent care units in each location for easier decision making.
4. Improved visual design of the website.
Further studies
A major pain point of users from the interviews was the extended wait times experienced in the urgent care/ emergency unit which spans for a lot longer than estimated on the website. While this is beyond this design scope, it is a major concern for most Albertans. An interviewee with a baby under 1 year experienced a wait time of 5 hours while another 14 hours (That is an alarming amount of time) because their cases were not considered critical. However, their total consultation and prescription time took a total of 15 and 10 minutes respectively. Further study is required to proffer solutions to this concern.
Please check out clickable prototype: AHS Prototype