UX design is an essential component of a digital product in any sphere, including healthcare. But some companies still doubt whether it’s worth investing a lot in a product’s UX. In this article, we give five cogent reasons you should invest in UX design. We also share several useful tips on how to create a great user experience for your healthcare app or website.

Reasons to invest in the UX design of your healthcare software

Medical software systems are complex, created with the help of various programming languages, tools, and environments. These building blocks are invisible and intangible to users. 

Design is something of the opposite. It presets technology to users. A high-quality UX design lets users smoothly interact with a complex system.

Below, we list the top four reasons why you should make UX design an integral part of your investment strategy.

#1. Enhance the efficiency of your medical organisation

Software opens the door to many healthcare opportunities. For example, software can reduce paperwork, streamline hospital processes, and improve staff training. 

A quality UX design in healthcare software helps to facilitate all of these processes and, as a result, helps you deliver quality services faster. Here’s what a robust UX design does.

Improves information hierarchy 

The visual hierarchy of your software determines the order in which users perceive information when using your software product. Without a proper information hierarchy, users won’t be able to understand where to start when interacting with your system.

There’s a lot of information stored in healthcare software: medical records, analysis results, patient histories, and much more. By correctly applying visual hierarchy principles, you make it easier to digest all this data, put each element in its proper place, and highlight the most important ones. Thus, you prioritize content and make navigation through your app or website much more intuitive. 

Allows for process automation

Every day, doctors spend two-thirds of their working time (about seven hours out of an eleven-hour workday) doing clerical work. By implementing a well-designed automation system, medical software may generate real-time reports and show analytics that users need. Software programs can also remind patients about upcoming hospital visits or automatically send them laboratory results. 

However, all these benefits of using a software solution may be unachievable if the UX design of your program is complex and unclear. A quality UX design allows you to make sure any user can intuitively interact with your software solution.

Provides for seamless data exchange 

The smooth exchange of data within and between healthcare organizations allows users to reduce communication silos, increase process transparency, and increase efficiency. With a well-designed electronic health record (EHR) system, doctors and hospital administrators can securely exchange data, saving their time as well as their patients’. 

For instance, with the CareDox platform, parents can easily transfer data on a child’s health between school nurses. The app offers sidebars, placeholders, and drop-down lists to let parents accurately fill in information and share it with care providers when a child switches schools. Parents can control data transmission using a mobile app or website and always have access to emergency information.

#2. Increase your return on investment (ROI) and optimize your expenses

The ROI for UX design is impressive: by investing $1 in UX, you can get $100 in profit. You can achieve this profit in various ways. For instance, UX design can retain users and stimulate them to come back to your healthcare software, again and again, thereby increasing your profit. A great UX design also plays a significant role in attracting new users. A product with an effective UX design needs less promotion. More people will want to use well-designed healthcare software because it brings a great user experience.

Good UX design in a healthcare solution not only improves ROI but also helps you rationalize investments. Poorly designed healthcare software can become even more expensive than software that took more time and money to create in the first place. The thing is, making changes after a project is released can be 15 times more expensive than making those same changes during the planning and design stages.

On top of that, UX design helps you avoid investing in training staff to work with your medical software. Before launching software, designers should test it to determine if users can independently achieve their desired goals. Thorough usability testing helps designers create an intuitive interface that every user can handle.

#3. Enhance the user experience

A healthcare product with a seamless and smooth UX design efficiently eliminates users’ pain points and improves overall user satisfaction. Here are some examples of how a great UX design enhances the user experience:

Increses transparency 

94 percent of users are loyal to products that operate transparently. Don’t leave users in the dark. UX design allows you to create a transparent and user-centered product in order to build a long-term relationship with your patients. 

You can use notifications or an introductory guide to inform users about how and for what purposes their data will be collected, processed, and stored. Such openness allows you to be transparent with your patients from the very beginning of your relationship.

Provides better control over data

Millennials want to control every aspect of their lives, and healthcare is no exception. To allow users to better monitor their health, it’s imperative to invest in quality design. A well-thought-through UX design allows users to have constant access to their medical records and make data-driven decisions. 

Saves time

Quality software UX design helps users save time. Through UX design practices like creating an information architecture (IA), designing user flows, and precisely testing prototypes, designers create smooth and intuitive software navigation, helping users find what they need without unnecessary interactions.

#4. Increase user loyalty

Three-quarters of people judge an organization’s efficiency based on the design of their website or app. Effective design means users have a great experience not only with your medical software but with your organization. When users intuitively understand what steps they should take next and can achieve what they want to achieve with minimal effort, they become loyal to your software and your medical organization in general. However, if users meet problems and often turn to support, this might mean the UX design of your software is crude, and patients may be less loyal to your medical organization.

Tips on how to boost user satisfaction with UX design

Now that you understand why it’s worth investing in the UX design of your healthcare software, we’ll share tips on how to create a great user experience.

Create intuitive navigation

A design is intuitive when users immediately understand how to interact with an application or website without thinking about how to perform an action. An intuitive navigation system is essential for both patients and healthcare providers.

The first step toward designing an intuitive UX is thinking over user flows. User flows are diagrams that show users’ interactions with your software and their path from the starting point to the desired goal. When creating user flows, you put users at the center of your healthcare software, focus on their actions, and come up with smooth user interactions. 

According to HubSpot, 76 percent of users say the most important factor in the design of an app or website is whether it allows them to easily find what they want. By analyzing user flows, designers can see how users move through the software and can determine if they can simplify this path. Also, it’s worth hiding additional features and bringing frequently used and important features to a prominent place. This way, users won’t have any difficulties achieving their primary goals while using your medical software.

The UGEM team has created a concept medical app that’s an excellent example of how good software navigation can simplify a doctor’s work.

On the screen above, you can see a booking dashboard for doctors. Using this dashboard, doctors can switch between patients’ cards (on the left side of the screen) and view appointment times and dates while seeing information about patients. The arrangement of elements on patient cards is convenient, as doctors don’t need to switch between several screens to find what they need. 

Use real photos

Using real photos in medical software is a great way to provide more information to users in an easy and digestible way. This practice can be applied in all sorts of medical software solutions. For instance, when using a telehealth platform, users would like to see doctors’ real photos to feel they’re choosing a doctor they can trust.

Also, real photos can be used in medical software that sells various products. Here’s how our team used this approach. 

This is a concept for an online pharmacy service. In the image above, you can see that each product has a name, price, and a real photo, reducing the possibility of a patient purchasing the wrong item.

Provide an end-to-end experience

When creating medical software, try to think globally and broadly about user needs. By placing users at the center of your healthcare product, you’re more likely to eliminate multiple user pain points at once, set your software apart from the competition, and add value to your business. 

An example of how you can implement this idea is shown below in our concept for a health app.

The UGEM team created a concept for a medical platform where users are able to take advantage of multiple services in one place. They can not only purchase supplements but can consult with pharmacists if they have doubts and choose a nutritional plan via the platform. The advantage of an end-to-end experience is that users don’t need to switch between platforms to get everything they need.

Visualize complex data 

The field of medicine is full of data. A healthcare application has to not only store and organize this data but also visualize it in an easy to digest manner. 

Only a few users can understand all healthcare information when receiving raw, complex data. By combining data and plotting it in graphs, you can provide users with a more valuable experience and make complex information understandable.

The well-known Health application for iOS demonstrates high-quality and understandable data visualization.

Instead of reading lengthy reports of activities throughout the day, users can quickly check data charts. Also, users can independently enter metrics such as blood sugar, pulse, and blood pressure, which will also be displayed in the form of diagrams. Using such a system, anyone can effectively track their health. This is especially useful for patients with chronic diseases. 

Build trust

To build trust with your patients, you need to get to know them better and eliminate their fears. For instance, today, more and more users are concerned about the security of their digital data. Emails, phone numbers, and other sensitive data are increasingly becoming publicly available. Ensuring security from the first seconds of interacting with your medical software can give patients a reason to trust your organization.

Although it’s mainly the back end of your software that’s responsible for providing uninterrupted security, the UX design allows you to walk users through data protection processes as painlessly as possible.

Make your healthcare system user-friendly 

The goal of UX design is to make the interface of your healthcare software clear in order to provide users with a great experience and retain them.

There are many ways UX design helps you with this. But the first thing patients face when using your app or website is data fields they need to fill in. Every detail is important here, and the more information your organization gets from a user the better. Try not to overwhelm users with a lot of fields at the very beginning. Walk them through the data entry process smoothly and help your users reduce mistakes. Add placeholders, masking, date pickers, and autocomplete suggestions to simplify the process.

Bottom line

An effective UX brings many advantages to your healthcare organization. The main thing to remember is that it’s much easier and cheaper to develop a high-quality UX design from scratch than to redo a low-quality UX design later. If you’re ready to create an outstanding UX design for your healthcare product, contact our team and we’ll get started ASAP.