The product design team had never talked to a single HeyDoctor patient before. We have sent surveys to patients, but we have never had a 1:1 user interview with them before. Previous attempts by the user research team resulted in patients not responding to screener surveys or signing up for sessions. Patients were not jumping at the opportunity to talk about their medical conditions. Also, there are a lot of legal barriers to jump over. This is due to the fact that in healthcare, we need to do everything possible to protect personal patient information and patient health information.

On top of that, the design and research teams were still trying to convince leadership of the value of user research.

Lastly, we were not designing in the blind. We have close relationships with the doctors that treat and talk to patients everyday. We would talk to doctors as a proxy to better understand our patients, but that could only get us so far. And we would talk to customer support on a bi-weekly basis to understand the issues that patients would call in or message about.

So how could we talk to patients under these constraints? Persistency is key.

I led a 3-month effort to run our first-ever user interview study with 10 patients. The first 2 months involved building relationships with cross-functional team members, creating the research plan and recruiting material, and finally, convincing patients to talk to us.

We needed to have a finalized script, screener survey, and all email communication prior to sending anything to the legal and medical team for review. Anytime anyone wanted to make modifications to anything, it needed to go back into review, so I made sure it was reviewed by all stakeholders prior.

Now, what did we even want to learn about these patients? Well, like I said, this is the first time we've ever gotten a chance to talk to them before. I wanted to know everything, but I also knew very little about them. I opted to keep the script very simple to keep the conversation open and here's what I wanted to know:

HeyDoctor's top visits are highly personal medical conditions (erectile dysfunction, birth control, and urinary tract infection). The previous attempt by our UXR team wanted to talk to patients about those conditions and saw just 1 person responded to their screener survey. In this user interview study, I didn't want to talk to them about their condition, I wanted to talk to them purely about their experience with HeyDoctor.

In all email correspondence, I made sure to emphasize that this was not about their condition and only about their experience with HeyDoctor. If they were uncomfortable with anything, we didn't need to talk about it and could skip that topic.

Also, it probably helps that we upped the ante from a $60 gift card to $100 gift card.

I talked to 10 patients in 2 weeks. It was thrilling! And I learned so much about who our patients are, what decisions they have to make when concerning their health, and what are their more expensive alternatives are outside of HeyDoctor. We already started to break down some of assumptions about patients from these first few interviews.

Now that we have this process created, we can run user interviews quicker and more frequently. And any designer on the team can run a user interview study now!