The HeyDoctor product design team had never talked to any HeyDoctor patients before. Surveys were sent, but one-on-one user interviews had never been attempted. Previous efforts by the GoodRx's user research team faced challenges like low survey response rates and patient reluctance to participate. Legal barriers in healthcare added to the complexity of protecting patient information.

Additionally, the design and research teams were still working on convincing the leadership team about the value of user research, which was an uphill battle.

To clarify, we did have relationships with the treating doctors who interacted with patients daily. However, relying solely on them had limitations. We also held bi-weekly meetings with the customer support team to address patient issues.

Despite these constraints, I led a three-month initiative to conduct the first-ever user interview study with 10 patients. This involved building relationships, creating a research plan, and recruiting participants.

Build relationships ->

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HeyDoctor specializes in highly personal medical conditions such as erectile dysfunction, birth control, and urinary tract infections. In a previous attempt by our user experience research (UXR) team, they aimed to talk to patients about these conditions but received a response from only one person for their screener survey. However, for this user research study, my focus was not on discussing their medical conditions. Instead, I wanted to purely explore their experience with HeyDoctor.

Throughout our email correspondence, I made it clear that the conversations would solely revolve around their experience with HeyDoctor and not their specific medical conditions. If they felt uncomfortable discussing anything, we respected their boundaries and skipped those topics altogether.

Additionally, we decided to increase the incentive by raising the gift card value from $60 to $100, which likely helped in attracting more participants.

I had the opportunity to interview 10 patients within a span of 2 weeks, and it was an amazing experience! These interviews provided invaluable insights into the lives of our patients, the decisions they face when it comes to their health, and the alternative options they consider that may be more expensive than HeyDoctor. In fact, from these initial interviews, we were already able to challenge and break down some of our preconceived assumptions about our patients.

With this well-established process in place, we can now conduct user interviews more efficiently and on a more frequent basis. The best part is that any designer on our team can now take the lead in running a user interview study. This empowers our entire design team to gain direct user insights and contribute to the user-centered design approach.