Designing for deeper engagement
Redesigning the consultation experience
Practo introduced the online doctor consultations in 2015. Majorly the consultations were designed to be performed on a chat based application. The text based experience failed to satisfy the user needs. Hence, the product did not reach the expected growth. Eventually the organisation stopped investing in the product.
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When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, it hit Practo too. Till then, our core product was the booking of clinic appointments. This service experienced a conversion churn of 80% when India went in a total lockdown. This was the right time to invest new energy in improving our online consultation experience in order to serve our consumer needs during the crisis.
Flats & Flatmates
The problem statement
Flats & Flatmates
Our goal for the project was to create an impactful consultation experience which makes the users stick to the platform. Furthermore, we wanted to lay a strong foundation for a product which has the potential to be a future core product of the company.
Our high level goals:
1. Design a better collaboration platform for doctors and patients.
2. Give users more control over their experience.
3. Create a platform for innovation and deeper engagement.
My role
I worked out the design of the complete experience in collaboration with my team.
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The features are getting released in parts and the complete design is expected to be released by Jan 26th, 2021.
Understanding the current product
Getting started
At the starting of the project we did not have a clear mission or specific goal for the consultation experience. Without pre-existing insights we conducted a UX review and usability testing on the current consultation experience. The idea was to understand the obvious blockers before getting into the user research.
Mapping the current journey
We found many obvious issues in the current experience which were not acknowledged before. In order to create a good overview of the state of the product and the opportunity areas, a journey map was created.
A map of the consultation journey broken into two phases: I call the first phase of starting the consultation "providing care" and the second phase of ending the consultation "take care".
What our data reveals
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Patients wait in an average 12 minutes before getting a first reply from the doctor
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Only 1% of the users connect with doctors on video consultations. However, those who consult on video provide more positive ratings.
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All the consultations which had less than 25 messages exchanged between the doctor and patient resulted in poor ratings.
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Just 15 % of the users made use of the free follow-up feature. In an average 650 customer care tickets were generated for doctors ending the consultation abruptly.
Early Insights from usability testing
We tested the existing consultation experience with five participants during the real time doctor consultation. Our goal was to understand the challenges consumers were facing during the consultation.
Insufficient information
Patients did not trust the online consultations on Practo because of a lack of information about the doctors. Most of the patients were doubtful about the qualification of the doctors.
Switching to WhatsApp for video calls
After the initial chat conversation on Practo patients connected with the doctors on Whatsapp video calls because the Practo video experience was too buggy.
Long waiting periods
Patients got frustrated while waiting for the doctor to respond. The patients felt especially helpless because the could not even see if the doctor is online or not.
Doctors end the consultation abruptly
Patients were frustrated with doctors ending the consultation abruptly without prior information. Follow-up messages were also only replied after days. 40% of the users did not receive any reply at all for their quiery.
The discovery
Primary research
Practo used to have the impression that people were not interested in visiting doctors through video consultations. The company had assumed that video consultations are too futuristic. However, our research gave us completely opposite insights.
Top findings from the research:
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Users do not trust the doctors on Practo. (Not enough information provided about the doctor)
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There is a huge delay in doctor message replies and users do not have any control over it.
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Users feel cheated when the consultation is short. Most of the Practo doctors try to close consultations quickly in order to complete more consultations.
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Patients fail to explain their health problem on chat.
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Patients loose trust in the doctors as they do not ask enough questions.
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The majority of the users do not understand the video consultation feature on Practo.
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Many users want to discuss their health progress with the doctor, but doctors do not reply to the patient's follow-up messages.
Reframing the problem
Through the research we discovered the opportunity to improve the online consultation experience instead of declaring it as too futuristic for the present.
This discovery demanded us to think beyond our initial goal to redesign the current chat experience and instead focus on the overall trust and quality experience of the consultation with a major eye on the video call feature.
How we got there
Three primary questions formed my design strategy.
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How to design for improving trust?
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How to design for deeper engagement?
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What defines a good online consultation experience?
Early on, it was important to understand the different factors that may influence the patient's and the doctor's experience. I mapped all the possible scenarios and translated them into the spectrums and situations framework.
Aligning the team to think for trust and quality
I created an additional hierarchy of needs framework in order to reframe our team conversations about the quality of the Practo experience and features.
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This framework helped us to move away from unproductive questions like "How will a video replace the patient's need to communicate the severity of the pain?" to "How can we change the negative perception of users and create a trustworthy online consultation experience?"
Design Directions
Working backward from trust
Based on these insights, I proposed two key ideas:
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1: Connect with the best doctor
Introduce an online assistant who will understand the patient's health problem correctly and connect him or her with the best suitable doctor. Then, provide the video consultation option as the primary feature.
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2: Create a video consultation room
Connect to the best available doctor quickly and create a video consultation room for a trustworthy collaboration experience. During the waiting time engage the patient with the assistant to collect the health history.
Solution 1
Understanding the patient's health problem first
The research insights helped me to create a concept around introducing an assistant as the first touch point in the experience. The role of the assistant was intended collect information about the patient's health problem in order to assign the best suitable doctor available. That way the doctor enters the consultation with a better understanding of the issue and is able to provide a quality consultation. Furthermore, this approach increases the duration of the consultations on Practo and exposes the video consultation for the users as a first choice. We also expected that the assistant will eliminate the patient's waiting time and improve the trust in Practo doctors.
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I designed mocks of this concept for internal presentation. At the first impression the idea looked quite promising.
Early explorations of the direction 1. I designed for better engagement and care. We had done the concept testing with a simple clickable prototype but it did not receive the excitement we had expected from the users.
Direction 2
Video consultation room for a better collaboration
This idea is all about enhancing trust and increasing the users engagement. In this concept we introduce the doctor first and provide more details about the doctor to improve the trust. While the video consultation room is being created we introduce the assistant in order to engage the user until the doctor attends the consultation. In the concept testing this idea was favoured over the idea 1. Post the validation of the concept I created a new flow.
Say Hello Doctor
The mock-ups above represent the golden flow of the proposed consultation experience.
The Impact
Positive results and much more to do
The project is getting released in parts. As an experiment we released only the video call features and already saw positive results. The entire project will be released by Feb 16th 2021.
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Video consultations increased by 70%
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The percentage of feedback that collected 4 to 5 stars increased from 82% to 90%