Healthdirect Symptom Checker

Healthdirect’s Symptom Checker required a complete overhaul of design and user experience.
The completion rate of this web based health assessment tool was at an average of 45% and Healthdirect aimed to improve this.
A roadmap was laid out and together with the DevOps team, we set out to achieve the business goals and to integrate Infermedica’s AI, a sophisticated medical inference engine.

Requirements Gathering and Kick-Off

All business requirements that included Australia government policies and clinical standards were gathered and a kick-off was carried out.
The Infermedica AI engine was audited for a comprehensive understanding of its capabilities and limitations.
A comparative scan of other products in the health industry was carried out to inspire ideation.

User-Centered Design and Ideation

User needs, problems and journeys were defined.
Information architecture and low-fidelity sketches were developed to gather feedback and foster ideation with the engineering team and business stakeholders.
Content strategy aimed to help people to understand the medical terms, questions and instructions.

Scope

UX facilitation

Cross-collaboration

Content strategy

User research

User interface and detailing

Accessibility for all

Heuristic reviews conducted to identify usability issues and iterate designs before proceeding to more resource-intensive usability testing.
User Research with diverse groups included people with disability and tech-wary individuals. We tested for user friendliness and micro-copy. Iterations of designs through each round of testing with users helped achieve a clear, concise and usable user experience.
Adhered to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards to ensure interfaces are usable by people with disabilities, such as screen reader compatibility and keyboard navigation.
Implemented soothing color schemes that are sensitive to user emotions

Solving user problems

Encourage user as they progress through a lengthy questionnaire

The usability testing revealed that the encouragement screen functioned as a good step in adding a human voice and propelling users to progress.

The steppers and clear instructions helped craft a supportive user experience and ease user anxiety.

Actionable care advice

Other key user problems we aimed to solve is the cognitive overload of information and presenting the care advice in a way that is actionable.

The solutions:

Help users make decisions by answering the questions they have in mind so they could compare and decide the type of clinic that would suit their needs. E.g. wait times, appointment requirement, cost at different clinics.
Number each type of clinic to show in order of recommendation.
Bold wordings for important info for easy scanning.
Surface key information on service card when user looks for a medical service, such as “No fee”, “Bulk Billing”, “3.0km” for nearest clinic to them.

Implementing motion design for the in-app Symptom Check tool

Below is a prototype with implementation of motion design to improve user engagement. This idea was pitched to the business to potentially hire developer who specialises in developing interactive animations.

Supporting the team in conflict resolution and workflow improvement

One of the challenges the team faced was the ownership of content write-up, definition of done and signed off. I facilitated a workshop for workflow improvement with the cross-functional team. Below is the artefact of the outcome where all stakeholders talked through each proposed idea to improve our collaboration process.

Achievements

Increased user completion rates to 68% by the end of 2023, compared to the previous design’s average of 45%.
Further increased completion rates to 86.5% for the 2024 release.
Met high consumer demand for digital triage across jurisdictions in Australia
Facilitated workshops for workflow improvement and conflict resolution for cross-functional team, reducing project delays by approximately 20%

Scroll on to view artefacts of the end-to-end design process