Valley Health Mobile App
Health and wellness, now in the palm of your hand.
With an established digital presence, and a name within its community, Valley Health System needed just one more thing: a mobile app to further connect with its patients and provide easy access to care.
Project goals
- Provide quick access to care and personalized care options.
- Access to a full provider directory with online scheduling capabilities
- GPS and directions for all locations
- Reflect Valley’s digital branding and dynamically pull in featured news and alerts from the website.
The ChallengeIncrease visibility and convenience
Valley Health System provides high quality services and patient- and family-centered care throughout New Jersey and southern New York. As a current client of Centretek, Valley already had a digital presence but needed a mobile app to extend their reach to be accessibility to all they serve.
My role
I handled the full UX/UI design of this project, wireframing key pages and visually designing the user journey of the mobile app.
Target AudienceMeet the users
Name: Andrew
Age: 38
Occupation: Web Developer
Andrew lives near Valley Health’s largest hospital and after a recent accident, he downloaded the app in order to have urgent care and emergency care locations easily accessible.
Name: Susan
Age: 81
Occupation: Retired
Susan lives alone in New Jersey and already sees several doctors at Valley Health. She downloaded the app so that she can quickly pull up the patient portal to schedule appointments and pay bills online.
Name: Carly
Age: 45
Occupation: Hair Stylist
Carly is a single mother and recently moved to New Jersey. Her friend recommended Valley Health, so she downloaded the app to find a family medicine and primary care doctor near her.
ApproachAccess to care
UX design process
I began by identifying key goals, and mapped those out as user flows. The primary goal was finding emergency care and accessing those locations from the landing page. The user would need to see how far away each hospital was to their current location and get directions. Finding walk-in care clinics was the secondary goal, and that became another key tile on the landing page. We also needed to integrate geolocation and estimated wait times into each walk-in care location card. Both actions were connected with the locations search, making sure ‘location type’ was a key filter. Lastly, the third goal was to schedule an appointment with a primary care doctor. This became the third tile on the landing page. Doctors and locations were the first two items in the sticky bottom nav bar for quick paths to their respective searches.
I only created a handful of pages in wireframes, but this phase helped to inform the priority pages to feature in the sticky navigation, as well as what functionality should be replicated from their website (and what we could omit). We strategized tools to enable recent searches, investigated user personalization, and explored ways to integrate access to patient portals.
The visual design was clean and simple. Top actions (such as scheduling appointments and finding urgent care) were created as familiar app icon buttons, and patient resources were prioritized with a distinct link style.
Insights
The mobile app was created as a hybrid that leveraged programming languages such as React Native. It was designed to be done in multiple phases. The second phase will include in-depth user testing, portal integrations, a chat bot, and full app experience with all pages recreated in the native app.
TakeawayDemand for a fully integrated app
Over 3,000 people have downloaded the app. Based on a few reviews, we’re noticing that users are confused by the hybrid approach. That was to be expected. A full app experience is slated for a future phase, so we anticipate those pain points will be appropriately addressed.
What did I learn?
This was my first mobile app design, so I spent a lot of time researching competitor apps and learning the technical difference between app and web development. I found it difficult to conduct design reviews on my phone instead of inspecting on a staging environment, so I had to learn to trust my engineers. That required transparent communication and frequent collaboration. I’m looking forward to the future, fully integrated phase, and being able to help Valley further connect with its patients.