tiffany ton

Product designer
2020 - 2021

The HeyDoctor product design team had never talked to any HeyDoctor patients before. Surveys were utilized, 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 with patients reluctant to participate. Also, legal barriers in healthcare added to the complexity in order to protect patients' personal and health 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 a strong relationships with folks who interact with patients.
- We interviewed and shadowed providers on a weekly basis to understand their experience with the platform and to learn about patient sentiment.
- We also held bi-weekly meetings with the customer support team to address patient issues.

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

To make sure this initiative was successful, I built relationships with key stakeholders at the company that spanned outside of the HeyDoctor/telehealth vertical and into the GoodRx team.

- Director of UXR (GoodRx) - How can we work together to build a process to enable the design team to talk to patients?
- CRM team (GoodRx) - How can we work together to build a process to enable the design team to talk to patients via Braze (an existing email marketing tool)?
- Legal team (GoodRx) - What tools can we use and how can we get those tools approved by legal? Prior to every single interaction with the patient, does it need to be reviewed with legal? (spoiler: yes)
- Finance team (GoodRx) - Can we get a budget to pay participants for their time?
- Medical team (HeyDoctor) - What do we need to be careful of, in order to protect patient information and continue to make patients feel safe?

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

Throughout our email correspondences and survey descriptions, 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 would respect 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.

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

Throughout our email correspondences and survey descriptions, 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 would respect 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 considered that might have been more expensive than HeyDoctor. In fact, from these initial interviews, we were already able to challenge and break down some of our pre-conceived 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 improving our user-centered design approach.