The home exercise program (HEP) is up to 50% of the reason patients will achieve better outcomes from physical therapy. Unfortunately, patients have lost motivation to take time for themselves to work through recovery.
Aug - Sep 2021 (80 hrs)
UX Research, UX Design, Visual Design, Usability Testing
Figma, Notion, Procreate, Whimsical, Zoom
If you’ve seriously injured yourself in the past or simply do not maintain proper work ergonomics, you may have gone to see a Physical Therapist to get your body to bounce back to its usual self.
The therapist will perform and go over exercises that will relieve the pain. The session will end with the therapist providing a piece of paper with your assigned home exercise program. The home exercise program includes highly suggested daily exercises to complete until your next in-person session. Patients tend to skip their assigned home exercise program and purely rely on their in-person visits for temporary relief from their pain, losing out on maximizing their recovery time.
With this in mind, Physio Care’s mission is to assist patients with the difficult task of staying motivated and adhering to the home exercise program so that their patients can speed up the recovery journey.
Now where do we begin?
Subject Matter Expert
Discuss with therapists on effective methods for patient recovery outside the clinic. Successes stories, motivators, or potential obstacles.
1:1 Interviews
Empathize with patient’s on their struggles with balancing their recovery and daily lives. Gaining insight into patients daily goals, pains, or needs.
Competitor Analysis
Research competitors in the healthcare field to understand what current products deliver. Strengths, weaknesses, or areas of opportunity.
I was able to create a user persona based off my user research and data. Lisa represents an amalgamation of key points from my users goals/needs and pain points.
In efforts to ensure a human-centered mindset, answering these six areas will help understand the broader influencers in Lisa's life.
By comparing the business goals, customer goals, technical goals, I was able to analyze where they align and focus on the common objective.
By creating point of view statements for Jonathan, I’m able to think of how we might be able to assist him and some solutions that could come from these questions.
Keeping the sitemap simple was extremely important as the main focus should be the patients will to do the home exercise program.
Walking through the MVP of the home exercise program to understand what screens the patient would encounter to complete a single workout.
Exploring the different routes the patient would take to get to their home exercise program, as well as other routes throughout the app.
FRUSTRATION
Although participants enjoyed seeing the upcoming exercises listed out, as well as seeing the total number of exercises in the hero image overview, they still wished to see the exercises numbered.
Solution
Rearranging the exercise list view proved to be a little difficult as everything fit a little too perfectly in the first place, leaving not very many options to add more content. I decided to move the time stamp onto the photo to associate how long each exercise would take, then placed the exercise number in the section I previously had the timer in.
FRUSTRATION
Participants loved seeing the layout of the exercises and the explanation followed by the video, but they wished there was an overall timer to countdown the full workout. Additionally, all participants were able to correctly determine what exercises they were on, but for some it took some time to understand the “1/5”.
Solution
Adding an overall timer was top priority, but adding it in a way that it didn’t distract from the main exercise content. Also I changed the language for the “1/5” to “1 of 5” to avoid any confusion.
FRUSTRATION
The standout section for participants was the ability to review their workout. Most all of the content was readily available, but participants would’ve wanted an overall comment section to give their thoughts on the entire workout. Also some participants didn’t understand this review would go directly to their therapist once submitted.
Solution
Giving a quick PSA at the top stating their review would be submitted to the therapist so the user immediately understands instead of after the fact. Also adding an additional comment section at the bottom so users can write out their lingering thoughts.
Based off the usability testing, the Physio Care app exploration was an overall success. Creating something that truly felt my own was an incredible feeling. All of the participants mentioned how their recovery journey would’ve been far better using this app to track their progress and keep themselves accountable. This was a reminder for me the health field is extremely under-developed and real change can happen if we put more effort into our health care. With my background, I hope to venture down this path one day.
If time permitted, I would love to explore more of the “Recovery Journey” and ways to incorprate incentives to keep the patients engaged with their home exercise program. I would love to test on how to make the review section even more streamline as it may get repetitive for the patients in a few weeks or months.
This was an important step in my design journey:
During my research phase I struggled a lot with gaining access into patients workout programs as I didn’t have an “authentication code.” This proved difficult to truly understand what was out there, but I was able to dive into Google and Youtube to get a birds-eye overview of their contents.
When selecting the typeface for the app, I wanted to keep the feel simple and readable, and chose two very similar fonts. Although easy to manage with a few screens, I’m sure this will become annoying down the road for developers to distinguish the two. If the fonts are so similar it’d be better to just move forward with one with different weights.
