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Project Overview
My Process
Defining the Problem
All of my projects start with problem-solving. Generally, I follow a design thinking process and begin by empathizing with the user before ever considering a solution. In this case, I had several interviews with my stakeholders - hospital department managers, nurses, medics, and EMTs - to understand each of their unique problems and use cases.
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Once I felt I had a clear understanding of the potential user, I created clear definitions of the problems they were facing.
Department managers lack an effective way to communicate available shifts and important announcements with medical staff while they are not at work.
Managers and nurses lack a way to track their required training modules, resulting in lapsed deadlines.
Nurses do not have a way to trade or give away shifts, when needed.
Following the interviews, I found that the current means of communication was the staff work email. The problem with this was that nurses understandably did not check their email while not at work. Messaging apps such as Whatsapp were not adopted because staff was hesitant to give up their personal number as they did not want to mix work with their personal lives, however, nurses did express a desire for a controlled level of communication.
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It became clear that there was a need for a sandboxed app that nurses and techs could use for controlled communication after hours. A couple of key features were identified:
Post & Pickup Shifts
Managers want to be able to post open shifts and have nurses request to fill them
Post Announcements
Managers want to be able to post announcements to specific groups.
Trade Shifts
Nurses want to post and facilitate trading shifts
Track Training Modules
Managers want to be able to track and send reminders about required training before their deadlines.
Push Notifications
Mangers wants staff to receive push notifications about important announcements and high needs shifts. Staff wants to be able to control how they receive those notifications.
Architecture
The information architecture was used to determine the user flow, permissions and accessibility, what screens will be needed, and the navigation of the app.
Wireframes
Wireframes were created using Sketch. The purpose was to determine the layout out of the basic elements that would be needed on the screens.
Style Guide
I decided on a primary color of maroon on white, with very few secondary colors. Instead, I used a large selection of different grays and neutral colors.
MVP Development
In normal circumstances, I would create a functional prototype before beginning development, however, because I am the sole designer and developer for this project, I decided to jump right into coding to cut time off my product delivery.
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This app was built for iOS and Android using Expo, React Native, and Amazon Web Services (Amplify, App Sync, Cognito, IAM, S3 Storage, Lambda, and Analytics). From ideation to MVP completion, I was able to deliver this app for beta testing at the hospital in 3 months.
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Final Outcome
With a design thinking and agile mindset, the goal is to deliver a product into the user's hands as soon as possible in order to start receiving feedback. For the MVP, I purposefully left certain components open or non-functional until I had a firm grasp on the various use cases. Now that I had solid feedback from actual users, I put the final touches on functionality and then went through a redesign of the user interface.
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