Health Vector - Full App Redesign

The founder of the Boston-based start-up Health Vector has reached me after discovering my profile on TopTal (the freelance talent platform). He presented all the design challenges he faced ahead and his vision, which I immediately got excited for.

As the only designer in the project my responsibilities had a broad range, which was very empowering. This project gave me the freedom and space to experiment and even explore illustration, icon design, branding challenges and more.

I worked closely with the founder which I developed a strong professional relationship with based on trust, which gave me even more power to take design decisions.

Throughout our collaboration I handled the research efforts, wireframing, prototyping, testing, iteration, UI design, illustration & iconography, hand-off and development support and more.

I was also an Advisor to the company and actively contributed to their overall product and market strategy.

The team was small but highly motivated - I worked closely with the founder, the CEO, the CTO and the development team. Everything happened in a remote setup but we briefly met in Boston for a strategic meeting.

The team wanted a full redesign of their main product, the Health Vector app, plus several other design challenges like redesigning the website and a number of satellite smaller apps.

The biggest challenge for me as a designer was to understand the American healthcare context and truly reach and empathise with our users.

Given that I was in a remote setup I had to compensate for not having the opportunity to hold face-to-face interviews and make an extra effort to understand our personas and their needs and goals, while getting a good grasp of the market factors and how the American society relates to health problems.

I proposed an initial UX Process roadmap that we aligned around, but of course we had to pivot adjust a lot of times along the way. I invested a lot of time in the research phase because I wanted to overcome the remote / different country factor. I used Skype to interview both patients and doctors and spent a lot of time on the recording to try to get as much insight as possible. It was a captivating journey because there was so much power in people opening up about their health struggles. I got to understand and discover common problems, fears, patterns, which enabled me to articulate a number of personas that I could trust make sense. We went through all the other stages afterwards, but looking back, it’s the research phase that was decisive to the project’s success.

I wanted to keep all the information architecture decisions in close relation to the research findings, always making sure as I progressed that the decisions made sense in regards to the insights I had about the people and market.

The project was of high complexity, as I had to create a highly detailed universe of use-cases, user scenarios, functionalities, flows and everything had to make sense and feel seamless, which is a challenge when you have so many features in the app ecosystem.

I pushed for some features to be removed, as research showed that had little or no value for the users, but instead increased the cognitive efforts the users had to make to navigate the app.

As I advanced with the app architectural decisions I tried to have micro-validations permanently along the way. Every flow was prototyped and tested fast with available users.

After launch I started an extensive effort to gather all the feedback that the usability testing efforts did not bring up.

Some of the design decisions I’ve taken have satisfied the needs identified in the research phase, such as having a quick-entry simple tracking flow, easily adjustable and skippable for moods and symptoms, while other features still needed fine-tuning and adjustments, which was great because it helped me reflect and understand in retrospective what worked well in the process and where it can be improved.