Project Description

Circle Medical is a new kind of full service medical practice that uses technology to deliver better patient experiences and outcomes at a lower cost.

This project hit all of the major elements of design work: user research, UX streamlining and UI polish.

The goal was to improve account creation and a patient's first office visit. Decreasing any frustrating or time-intensive paperwork should increase the quality of interaction with doctors, which would aid both diagnosis and relationship-building.

User Research & Design Solutions

I had the privilege of working alongside a design founder that was just as passionate about user research as I was. We recorded and analyzed interviews with almost everyone at the company, which revealed several common pain points.

The fun part is then turning the talk into pixels - boiling down all of those conversations into a handful of product insights and then translating those into new designs.

And because I started my career as a frontend developer and like to work directly with engineers, I often break my proposed solutions down even further into two buckets:

1. Easy: changes that are quicker for developers to implement.
2. Hard: more extensive changes that address underlying issues.

With that in mind, I designed these two flows for the check-in process of Circle Medical:

The second flow puts an even stronger emphasis on push notifications and ends with a friendly screen designed to help with wayfinding to the office.

That last screen is worth highlighting because it sets such a strong tone for a patient's first visit and shows how user insights drove design at every level.

The overall approach: establish trust and demonstrate helpfulness before asking the user to do work.

Providing useful info right up front sets a good tone and offsets the tedious process of account registration, which is especially important when someone might be under the weather or concerned about a health issue.

Splash Screens & Messaging

Language and visual design is also an invaluable tool for a designer, to help subconsciously communicate quality and the values of a product or service. The initial aesthetics can frame the rest of the experience by setting expectations.

First impressions have an impact on overall usability & perceived utility.

So in addition to tackling the UX of the check-in process, I focused in on the initial landing screens of the app and experimented with a range of complimentary visual styles: photographic, illustrative, and colorful.

Summary

I really enjoyed working on this project! These are people doing good in the world and it was clear from the first meeting that Circle Medical takes pride on the level of care provided by their doctors and medical staff. They see patient engagement as a differentiator among the flock of startups reinventing primary care.

Those values influenced me greatly and carried through into the end product in this case study.

Thanks for making it this far! Feel free to email me if you have any questions.