Hopease, an app designed to ease your journey through emergencies
When one says “Public Hospital Emergencies”, what comes through your mind? Pain? Waiting for hours? Lost in the corridors labyrinth? Not remembering what the caregiver said? Feeling lonely?
Imagine a mobile app that helps you ease all these torments… That’s what we intended to create with my teammates our second project.
Wait no more, here is a video of our low-fi prototype :
Features :
First, the user can choose between emergencies sorted by fullness (using a color code) and by speciality (Teeths, Eyes, Childrens or General). Then a GPS leads the way.
Then you can fulfil your personal file, it will accelerate the management of your admission at the emergencies.
While you wait, you can consult a timeline, summarizing all your interactions with caregivers, what they said and who they are. You can also share it with anybody in your phone notebook.
There is also a chatbot, if you have any questions.
Breathing exercises, meditation, kids games are provided to smooth your waiting and pain.
If you need to go to a particular place in the hospital, caregivers can give you a QR code to scan or you can choose your destination in a drop box, then a GPS will leads you through the Hospital.
But wait, how did we come up with such an app?
Ironhack’s challenge :
How might we transform the end-to-end experience in public hospitals? From requesting an appointment with the doctor to engaging in community initiatives or volunteering using a mobile app.
From this point we chose to focus on the emergency service. And then, we had no Idea what to do.
User research is the key :
At first we thought we could do something to help caregivers, but neither of us had an idea of how things were actually happening. That is why we did some user research.
A survey and a few interviews later, (doctors, nurses, patients and patient escorts) it appeared that there was nothing much we could do with a mobile app to help caregivers. On the other hand patients and their escorts really needed help! But how?
We gathered all our findings and insights in an affinity diagram. Three patterns sprung out, the major pain points where :
- The waiting
- Communication with caregivers
- Orientation before and in the hospital.
From this point, we builted four personas we built 4 personas using our interviews findings :
- One primary user, he just broke his leg. He is an occasional visitor
- Two secondary users both are patients escorts (Mother of a child and an elders flatmate)
- One extreme user, he has a disease that sends him regularly to emergencies.
We included all these personas in our design, (possibility to choose the emptiest emergencies for the extreme persona, sharing option, and games for the secondaries for example). We wanted an app that would be helpful for each kind of user and upgrade their overall experience at the emergencies.
What is next?
To go further, it could be very interesting to think how this app could be linked with other apps, like Doctolib or apple’s Health.
Key learnings :
I learned that when you don’t know what to do, go ask the users. Then gather all your findings, and if not satisfied, iterate.
I also learned that it’s very important to have an overview of the problem or you might not make the right design choices. In this particular case, every patient wants to know when their tour will come. But if something happens, and the waiting appears to be longer, it would cause too much deception and more aggressiveness toward caregivers.
Teamwork is essential without Quentin Massonneau, Juliette Gaboriau Marion Guitton this concept would have never seen the light.
Thank you for reading and see you soon!
