Category: Healthcare, Android App
My Role: Interaction audit, improvements in interaction patterns, user feedback interventions across the app, micro-interaction design, motion design for marketing, illustrations.
Client: Resolve to Save Lives. The project was done in my role as a Product Designer at Obvious Ventures, along with the Simple Design and Engineering teams.
Timeline: On and off, between 2018 and 2021
What is the Simple App?
Simple app is an initiative of the non-profit organisation Resolve to Save Lives and started with the goal of "saving 100 million lives from heart attacks and strokes". The Simple app is designed for clinicians to manage hypertension and diabetes patients and to record their BPs, blood sugar levels, and medicines at every patient visit. One of the primary challenges, in this context, is the speed of
The app is actively used in 7,144 public health facilities in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka to manage 3,999,551 patients with hypertension and diabetes as of 7th August, 2023.
Simple is an easy-to-use mobile app for healthcare workers to record BPs, blood sugars, and medicines at every patient visit in about 13 seconds.
Note: The video is shot and edited by Anand Ramakrishnan along with the Simple team. All rights of the video, if any, are reserved to the creators.
I worked with Resolve to Save Lives on and off since its inception and in different capacities; as an interaction designer, illustrator, content creator.
In my role as an Interaction Designer,
When the Simple app was in a mature state and deployed in 3 different countries and all the major Indian states, it was time to look back and improve its experience. So I was assigned to do a usability audit of the app and propose some high-impact interventions.
After making an extensive list of much needed improvements to the experience and prioritising them based on their impact, I proposed solutions. Here are some solutions needed in critical points of a nurse's journey.
Problem Statement 1
Since the Simple app was designed for an offline-first environment considering the app should work smoothly in rural villages of India, a data sync indicator-cum-button feature was designed to help nurses manually sync the data when available. Though after interviewing the nurses, I understood that it wasn't perceived as an interactive element at all. They did not know they had a choice, which led to a limiting experience when accessing fresh data.
Solution 1
The solution to this was an easy fix once we closely observed the environment they were working in.
A change in the interaction pattern used for the sync button made it look interactive. The addition of micro-interactions when the status changed helped nurses notice the change even in their high-paced environments and insufficient attention to what was happening on their phone screens
Problem Statement 2
Once the nurse saved a patient record, the app didn't give any feedback suggesting that the system saved the record successfully. This was a frustrating experience as the nurses weren't sure whether the record was saved or was in the process of saving. Some first-time users even stared at the screens waiting for an acknowledgment. Again, considering the fast-paced environment they were working in, it felt unfair to waste those few seconds out of the 2 minutes she had with each patient.
Solution 2
A more highlighted record popping in, with an explicit label telling the nurse the record had been "saved." Again, the addition of micro-interactions helped bring focus to the just performed action.
Problem Statement 3
Similar to the previous problem, the app failed to give any feedback at one of the critical points in the app, which was when the nurse would make phone calls to the patients. We observed in the field that nurses who had either a lower attention span or not-so-sharp memory would often forget the last patient name they called. With a laggy system, sometimes the nurse would call the same patient twice or skip calling a patient. This raised some questions about time management.
Solution 3
A highlight added to the patient record the nurse had called along with an icon clearly indicating whether the nurse made the call or not.
The result was that we made many such low-effort, high-impact implementations with the help of the engineering team, and the feedback we got from the nurses was heart-warming.
In my role as an Illustrator,
I conceptualized and created illustrations throughout the app, customized for different countries. I illustrated the concepts in a way that left no room for doubt about what they might mean.
I also created informative posters—like the one below—to be put up in clinics to aid the nurses in following good practices. These illustrations are supposed to be accurate in their postures.
In my role as a Content Creator,
I managed one of the campaigns to create awareness about hypertension and introduce the BP Passport app to help people manage it. Since this was a non-profit initiative, one constraint was working with a low budget. The process involved scriptwriting, storyboarding, illustrating, animating, and creating a plan for video circulation through different mediums. The video was produced in 4 different languages and later circulated in 6 different Indian states.