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The biggest challenge in healthcare UX is this: you can treat all the symptoms of an acute condition, but until you cure the root cause, the symptoms will keep coming back. The same is true for the products and systems healthcare organizations build. Good health UX requires seeing the macro view, understanding the psychology behind user behavior, and designing for meaningful outcomes -- not just functional ones.
What Is Health UX, and Why Does It Matter?
Health UX is the practice of designing healthcare products and services around the real needs of every person who touches them -- patients, family members, providers, care teams, administrative staff, and payers.
The ultimate goal isn't just a product that works. It's a meaningful outcome for everyone involved.
Ian Worden, Product VP and author of BetterPatientEngagement.com, frames this around a hierarchy of healthcare user experience needs:
- Engage: Users need to say yes to your products and services
- Sustain: They need to stay in the experience with continued use over time
- Act: They need to take action on their own behalf
- Grow: They need to experience personal growth and education over time
"When customers, care teams, and patients gain confidence and help themselves, they stick with it," Worden explains. "The reward of using your product or service should exceed the effort. It should be meaningful where the person will succeed."
Only when users are fully engaged will they reap the benefits and achieve the outcomes your organization set out to deliver.
What Are the Biggest Health UX Challenges Healthcare Organizations Face?
Engaging users and delivering positive outcomes is the destination, but the road to get there is littered with roadblocks: strict regulations, layers of administration, disparate systems, and more. Those obstacles can mean the difference between life and death, so there's more than just a desire to overcome them -- there's a responsibility.
Here are the seven most common healthcare UX challenges we see organizations experiencing, and how our team at Drawbackwards goes about solving them.
Challenge 1: They Aren't Aligned About Who Their Users Are and What They Need
Healthcare professionals often know the primary type of user who interacts with their product or service, but that's not enough. What about the others? And what is each audience segment actually looking for from you? Chances are their mindset and needs are quite different.
For example, most younger patients probably want to get in, out, and on with their day, while many older patients want their doctor to really spend time with them, build a relationship, and explain every detail. On the provider side, doctors look for in-depth health history and patient information, while administrative staff just wants to verify insurance, fill out forms, and complete tasks as quickly as possible.
To get the macro view of your users, our team uses methods including:
- Taking an inventory of all user types
- Conducting user research (interviews, data analysis) to learn each segment's unique needs
- Complementing first-hand research with empathy maps to understand how and why each user type interacts with your product
Only once you gain a holistic view of your users and their comprehensive needs can you create interactions and experiences that help them succeed.
Challenge 2: They're Having Trouble Making Mobile Experiences Meaningful
Mobile is everywhere, but how do you make sure those mobile experiences are actually effective? This question gets even more complex for aging populations who are less tech-savvy, or anyone who has used the same process or system for years. Even if it's outdated, they're used to it -- and convincing them to adopt something new is always an uphill battle.
Going mobile is all about prioritizing information, because you can't display as much on a smaller screen. In healthcare UX, that prioritization is even harder because of the sheer amount of information the average user needs to access quickly. A three-second delay can mean the difference between one-time use and sustained adoption -- or even life and death.
The mobile healthcare UX also requires meeting users where they're at in their journey and showing exactly the right information, on the right screen, in the right place, at the right time, in the right way. To do this, we use tools like:
- Guiding organizations through a methodical user research and design process
- Using design thinking to keep the process focused on user success, which leads to business success
- Doing usability testing before, during, and after development to reach the best solution faster and avoid wasting resources
Challenge 3: They Don't Understand the Various Paths Users Take
The number of different users and different paths they could take often feels overwhelming. It's even more difficult in healthcare because there is so much data to process, and most of it lives in silos. Lots of data can be hugely helpful, but only if you can easily access and understand it.
As the saying goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. After we've identified all the user segments and their needs, we go through the process of:
- Mapping out the "happy path" -- the best case scenario that most users will follow if everything goes as expected
- Digging into details with subject matter experts to uncover all the other potential scenarios, edge cases, and sources of data
- Identifying ways to surface the right information at the right moment and ensure that each unique path or experience is optimal
Challenge 4: They Aren't Sure Where to Begin
Once you see all the possible user paths, where do you go from there? You have all the bites of the elephant, but how do you tackle them in the right order for maximum efficiency and impact?
That's where having an external health UX partner really comes in handy. Your organization has deep healthcare expertise and domain knowledge, but it can be tough to see the forest through the trees. In contrast, Drawbackwards has deep UX expertise, but we don't presume to know everything about your company or users. When we join forces, we combine our strengths and create something even better together.
Our team starts UX collaborations with a discovery process to surface the core needs of your users and business, then strategize about how to approach them. Even when we develop a good plan as a group, making those plans a reality relies on building consensus and getting buy-in from other stakeholders. That's why we focus just as much on the diagrams, presentations, and prototypes needed to socialize the "why" among your organization, not just the "what."
Health UX initiatives are way too overwhelming for one person or team to handle, but it's much easier and more effective when you combine the power of internal SMEs with external guides and supporters.
Challenge 5: Their Users Get Lost in the System
Healthcare systems and apps are notoriously confusing. There are no clear pathways, calls to action, or indications that you're doing the right thing. When people feel frustrated, they just want to pick up the phone and talk to a human -- costing even more time, money, and energy.
To design clear paths, we combine strategic design exercises with good old-fashioned healthcare best practices:
- Mapping the user journey throughout the system to understand their needs at every step and identify breakdowns
- Streamlining the experience by adding more system confirmations to let users know when they're successful and getting them back on track when they're struggling
- Uncovering opportunities for automatic reminders to reduce cognitive load (such as reminders to book appointments, pay bills, bring information to an appointment, or complete other tasks)
By reducing friction and making the new way feel worlds easier than the old way, healthcare organizations can show their users the power of a positive experience and attract sustained customers for life.
Challenge 6: They're Settling for the Same Old Ways
Change is hard for anyone, but it's especially hard in healthcare. Many patients are older and set in their ways, and providers often continue using broken systems even though they're inefficient, because they're still functional and familiar. Add compliance regulations and the pressure of holding someone's health in your hands, and the stakes are even greater. Where is innovation supposed to live in an environment like that?
Sometimes, all it takes is someone with a fresh perspective to identify small opportunities that could make a huge impact.
For example, our team worked with LifeNexus to reimagine one of the oldest, most critical documents in healthcare: the Patient Health Record. PHRs are complex, outdated, and incompatible with disparate systems, so the Drawbackwards team worked side by side with LifeNexus to design a health record that delivers automatically updated, patient-specific information when a patient checks in for care -- accessible and shareable from any device.
This record surfaces the most meaningful, actionable information in a format that's easy to read for both patients and providers, resulting in:
- Higher patient engagement
- Significant time savings for all users
- More productive and efficient conversations in the exam room
- Better treatment and outcomes
- Higher reimbursements for providers
LifeNexus could have easily settled for the current, broken PHR. But by challenging the status quo and partnering with a team who could offer fresh ideas, they were able to revolutionize the experience for both patients and providers.
Challenge 7: They're Missing the Meaning, or Taking Too Long to Show It
Healthcare organizations have settled for products that just "get the job done." But in the new age of consumer-controlled healthcare, expectations are rising, and people are shopping for care like they shop for other goods. You have to earn their business.
Plenty of health products and services are functional, but that's not enough anymore. Organizations need to reach for the higher levels of the Experience Success Ladder and add more value. How will they make the healthcare user experience more comfortable, delightful, and meaningful?
Even the products that dramatically improve the healthcare experience often take too long to do it. Whether you're working with patients, providers, payers, or any other human, you have one chance to pique their interest and show them how you can improve their encounters. Are you making your chance count?
It's Time to Make a Difference with Health UX
Healthcare is rife with challenges, and it's all too easy to make excuses as to why it's not worth making changes.
"It would take too much time." "Compliance is so complex." "It costs too much."
But even if it takes time, even if it's hard to develop a compliant solution, even if it requires a short-term investment -- the payoff in the long run is worth it.
Better experiences create more engaged users and produce millions in ROI. More engaged users will continue to use your product over time and take action on their own accord. When they experience self-efficacy, they keep coming back and feel more meaning with every interaction.
When it comes to UX design, our motto is "User Success = Business Success." That's never been more true than in healthcare UX.
Want to breathe life into your organization's healthcare experiences? Visit healthux.com to learn how to begin.
Frequently Asked Questions About Health UX
What does health UX mean? Health UX (healthcare user experience) is the practice of designing healthcare products, systems, and services around the real needs of every person who uses them -- including patients, providers, care teams, administrative staff, and payers. The goal is meaningful outcomes, not just functional ones.
Why is UX design in healthcare harder than in other industries? Healthcare UX is harder because of the sheer volume of information users need to access, the number of different user types with conflicting needs, strict compliance regulations, deeply ingrained habits, and the fact that a poor experience can have genuine life-or-death consequences.
How do you figure out what healthcare users actually need? Start by taking an inventory of all your user types, not just the most common one. Then conduct user research -- interviews, data analysis, and empathy mapping -- to understand the unique mindset and needs of each segment. Only then can you design interactions that actually help each group succeed.
How do you get healthcare organizations to adopt new UX approaches when they're resistant to change? The key is making the new way feel worlds easier than the old way. That means reducing friction at every step, adding system confirmations so users feel confident, surfacing automatic reminders to reduce cognitive load, and building internal consensus by communicating the "why" behind changes -- not just the "what."
When should a healthcare organization bring in an external UX partner? When you can't see the forest through the trees. Your organization has deep healthcare domain knowledge, but an external UX partner brings a fresh perspective, structured design process, and the ability to identify opportunities you're too close to see. The combination of internal expertise and external guidance is where the real breakthroughs happen.
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