In it’s early days, My Doctor Online (MDO) was a website where a patient could learn about doctors in Northern California. As the site grew, our stakeholders contemplated next steps for MDO.
Many doctors requested webpages for specific care paths. They wanted these webpages to provide information to their patients. Since these sites would host the information, the doctors could point patients to them, thus alleviating some of their workload. One of the initial care paths we created a page for was diabetes.
How could we create a webpage that provides patients with the necessary information they needed to manage their diabetes?
Discovery and research
As we started to research diabetes and conduct user interviews with patients and doctors, we uncovered a few leading constraints:
- The Hispanic population is at higher risk of diabetes
- Diagnosed patients had no idea what to do or where to start with managing their care.
- Doctors informed us that exercise and eating properly was a key aspect to managing diabetes and many patients fail to follow this.
- The main measure of diabetes is your A1C score. This is a blood test that measures your blood sugar over the last 2-3 months. Patients have to check their A1C score often to make sure they are within the appropriate range.
Once we understood these key points, we had a better idea of the exact issues we were solving for.
Defining the problem
Patients had little to no understanding of the disease they have just been diagnosed with and those that were familiar with the disease wanted a way to manage it and stay up to date on their A1C.
Designing for our patients
Creating the language toggle
Since the Hispanic population was at higher risk, we decided to have the site translatable into Spanish. This created complexities for two reasons:
- This was the first time we had a bilingual site so we needed to have some sort of toggle that could switch the page to the Spanish translation
2. The Spanish language is approximately 30% longer in terms of length so we had to have a design that incorporate the English content as well as the lengthened Spanish content.
To solve for the switchable language, I designed a toggle which acted as a translation switch between the two languages. We tested it and it was extremely well received and ultimately became part of our component library.
Creating the A1C indicator
Doctors had requested that we create a visual indicator for the A1C score, a crucial component in diabetes care. It dawned on me that a visual indicator that simply displayed their score would likely not be enough to drive a patient to change their behavior. I suggested that we include a module that would give the patient guidance on how they could improve their score or, if they already had a good score, give them positive feedback for managing themselves well.
Delivering the product
We ran some guerrilla user tests amongst people on different floors to test out some of the elements we had designed. Namely the language toggle and the A1C score. Both components were extremely intuitive to them and passed with flying colors. We knew we had created something that would be effective. We ran further tests on our target population of patients that had diabetes and received similar results. After the creation of the site, we saw a drastic increase in traffic to My Doctor Online and a majority of the increase was to the diabetes page as it was also being promoted by the physicians.