Apps to track water intake, apps to count steps, apps to keep our diet balanced and sleep sound — we love them all for simplifying daunting yet necessary aspects of our lives. In fact, Statista reports that as much as 49% of adults in the US have spent money on a healthcare app within the past 12 months.
As the mHealth market grows, the set of features expands to accommodate the needs of more users. Modern healthcare solutions can not only provide the functionality of fitness apps but also help people manage their chronic illnesses, take medications, and even undergo parts of physical therapy. And a large part of such apps’ success is user-centric design.
Design in healthcare, as a concept, stretches beyond beautifying your app — it can go as far as having a life-saving impact on users. Well-informed UI/UX choices can promote adherence to certain vital routines in patients, streamline the workflow of medical staff, and much more.
Ultimately, healthcare mobile app design is a pivotal point that businesses need to get right to succeed in this fast-paced market. Read on to learn more about the best UI/UX practices for medical apps and what to consider while developing one.
Understanding users’ needs
In order to create a user-friendly app design, you first need to identify what users expect from the app. What works for one group within your target audience might be a hindrance to another, so you can start by sorting through your potential customers and gathering them into clusters with shared needs. In the healthcare industry, such groups can be represented by patients, healthcare providers, and hospital administrative staff.
Patients
Patients as a group may search for software that can help them manage, plan, or improve their health and lifestyle. Popular solutions for this group would include applications to record symptoms of a particular disease, keep track of medications, book doctor appointments, pay for medical services, or get access to their medical records and lab results digitally.
Also, remember that patients present a vast variety of knowledge levels, technological skills, and goals they seek to achieve. When building UX/UI design in healthcare — especially when it comes to apps for patients — make sure to keep it accessible and understandable for those who aren’t medical professionals.
Healthcare providers
Doctors and healthcare providers face insurmountable loads of information they need to create, maintain, and use. This group can benefit from software that digitalizes documentation, gathers patients’ information in one place, automates certain processes, and helps create treatment plans. When considering the design for a healthcare app that targets medical professionals, focus on identifying and resolving the pain points they deal with in their workflows.
Administrative staff
When designing for healthcare, you may wish to target another group besides patients and doctors — the administrative staff of a hospital or clinic. The administrative staff is the backbone of all operations of any medical institution. These are the people who create schedules for the medical staff, manage billing and patient fees (as well as overall hospital budgeting), train new employees, and act as a link between doctors, nurses, and patients. This kind of organizational load can be greatly reduced and optimized with appropriate software.
Best design practices for healthcare apps
When creating an mHealth app, developers aim to provide users with a gateway to simpler management of their health. This endeavor calls for specific design choices to break down the complexity that the medical field comes with. Here are several user-centric design practices that can elevate your app’s ranking and provide maximum value to users.
Prioritize usability
If you’re wondering how to design a healthcare app that stands out to users of all backgrounds, focus on usability. It can be tempting to include a new flashy animation on every other page, but an abundance of non-functional elements tends to make apps overwhelming and, at times, confusing.
Prioritizing usability means finding a balance between making your app pretty and useful — and those can frequently enhance one another. Straightforward and clean interfaces with well-chosen fonts typically improve the overall aesthetics of an app. And talking about design for healthcare applications specifically, they also help all users see the provided information correctly: you want no confusion to occur between “21.1” and “211” in a graphic representation of a test result.
Add accessibility features
User interface design for healthcare applications should take into account that many people perceive information and visuals differently from others. Accessibility as a focus point ensures that your app can be helpful to those with visual, auditory, cognitive, and other disabilities.
To boost the healthcare user experience, make sure your interface works for a wide range of users without the need for adjustment. Additionally, introduce customization options for fonts, sizes of elements, colors, and other elements relevant to your app.
In fact, some countries and areas like the EU enforce clear accessibility requirements for healthcare apps and platforms. Regulations like ADA in the US, and EN 301 549 in the EU postulate how different objects in the app should look and what functional features should be present.
Design intuitive navigation
Design for healthcare applications performs the main task of getting users from point A to point B in the most straightforward and error-proof way possible. When it comes to medical apps, users’ stress when interacting with your software might be high, and any mistakes made can have a significant influence on a person’s health outcomes. This is why making navigation intuitive is paramount.
A couple of things to consider when creating an intuitive health app UI design include the following:
- Simple menus with limited options. To avoid overwhelming users, you can choose to have a limited set of options in the main menu. Make sure to label them clearly and concisely.
- Sufficient button size. Buttons, along with any text on them, should be appropriately sized, especially considering your target audience might include users with visual or motor impairments.
- Predictability. All processes in your application should follow the same logic and enable users to perform them automatically in multiple settings. For instance, placing confirmation buttons in the same place on all screens and designing them to be uniform in color can make it easier for users to navigate and reduce the number of accidental errors.
Make sure all visuals are consistent
In the previous point, we’ve highlighted the importance of intuitive navigation, and consistency is one of its key components in healthcare app UI. When the design is ultimately the same across all pages and screens of your application, users can navigate between them quickly and almost automatically. They don’t need to re-learn the mechanics or get used to new color and font choices. By keeping it consistent, you enable users to have a smooth experience and build a habit out of using the app.
Additionally, style and visual design consistency beyond the application’s interface increases brand visibility. The design of an mHealth app should maintain the same brand image in all marketing materials, social media channels, and platforms your software runs on. Users will start recognizing your particular design and find it easier to trust the software that looks familiar.
Use color effectively
Colors can be a great guide in fast decision-making. Solid, vibrant colors signal confidence and readiness to proceed, while more subdued hues are perceived as less urgent or favorable when they indicate certain options. If you’re looking to craft user-friendly UX design in healthcare, leveraging the power of association users have with different colors is quite effective.
Also, when designing a color scheme for your app, keep in mind that some users may have color blindness and other visual impairments, so it’s fruitful to account for such needs by presenting color palette customization options.
With our expertise in app development and adherence to best design practices, we at Eastern Peak can help you build a healthcare app that truly stands out.
Looking to design and develop a healthcare app?
Implement interactive elements
UX design in healthcare works best when users can interact with different types of objects (not only buttons but sliders, checkboxes, etc.) and get immediate feedback corresponding to their actions. You can, for instance, program a confirmation button to change color or make a sound when pressed. Another option is to implement haptic feedback, which could greatly enhance the experience for all users who could struggle with perceiving visual or audio cues.
In addition to providing solid confirmation that a user’s action on the app has been performed, this kind of interactivity works to encourage and reward users. It always feels good to cross an item off a list or see your progress bar fill more and more each day. By crafting a sense of accomplishment with the simplest actions, you can motivate users to engage with the app more consistently.
Conduct usability testing
We have already talked about the importance of usability in healthcare app design, but when there’s a need to cater to such diverse categories of people, how can you be sure your design choices will actually work for all of them? The answer is simple: extensive usability testing.
Usability testing is a part of the QA process that evaluates how efficiently an app fulfills its purpose and what aspects of UI/UX could be improved. The main pillars it stands on are continuous testing and incorporating users’ feedback.
Continuous testing speaks for itself. If you conduct usability tests during each significant stage of development, you’ll be able to identify any issues faster and make sure all elements work well together as you keep adding functionality.
Analyzing users’ feedback is how you can accomplish this smooth process of testing and developing. By assembling a group of real users of various backgrounds and organizing testing sessions, you can observe how they interact with your health app design and gather their insights into how accessible, useful, and intuitive the application is.
3 examples of great healthcare app designs
So far, we’ve talked about efficient healthcare UI design and how to create it for your target audience. Now let’s take a quick look at several top apps in the field that are already employing all the tips and tricks we’ve discussed.
- Ada is an app that can suggest a diagnosis based on a user’s symptoms. It features a chat-like interface with clean subdued colors, on-point graphics, and purposeful use of distinct fonts.
- HealthTap is a telemedicine solution that helps smooth the process of finding doctors and booking appointments. It features an intuitive interface with bright “book now” buttons, an integrated chat functionality, and special designs for various elements in the app, such as visit notes, prescription lists, etc.
- Flo is one of the most popular reproductive health apps on the market. It helps track menstrual cycles, plan pregnancy, and get insights into how the body behaves during these processes. In terms of UX design for healthcare, Flo is a winner of simple yet interactive design with consistent and relevant colors.
Current trends in healthcare app design
Healthcare solutions have been evolving over the years — and they keep doing so at increasingly high rates. To design a healthcare app in 2024 and set it up for success, developers need to consider not only style elements but emerging technologies that they can implement.
Although there is a whole ocean of current technology innovations, we’ve handpicked four trends in healthcare design that are most relevant to the field.
AI-enabled personalization
Artificial intelligence has long since stopped being a mere buzzword. Its market size in healthcare is valued at $20.9 billion today, and it’s expected to reach $148.4 billion by 2029. Across the medical field, this technology has numerous uses, extending as far as helping identify cancer cells with incredible accuracy.
In terms of interface design for healthcare, AI enables much greater levels of personalization. It can adjust the interface of the app in real-time based on a user’s preferences, analyze user behaviors and interaction patterns, and proactively deliver context-informed suggestions and alerts, just to name a few.
Natural User Interfaces (NUIs)
One of the emerging healthcare design trends is natural user interfaces. NUIs represent a group of interfaces that people can interact with using their voice, gestures, or even by simply looking at them. A well-developed NUI could greatly assist users, particularly those with special requirements. However, keep in mind, that the learning curve for such technologies is quite steep, and it might be overwhelming for people who are used to more traditional app mechanics.
Gamification
With the help of gamification, you can enhance your healthcare app UX design and foster user engagement in a natural way. Gamification is the practice of adding game-like elements, such as leaderboards, coins, challenges, and maps, to name a few, to applications that are not designed as games.
This approach has been proven to promote adherence to treatment among patients and motivate them to perform certain tasks or actions consistently. In fact, the global market for gamification in healthcare is predicted to reach $3.5 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 21.4%.
Augmented reality
Augmented reality is one of the elements in healthcare user interface design that’s particularly relevant for medical professionals and those conducting their training. AR and VR are already revolutionizing the way doctors learn to perform surgeries and various procedures. For patients, AR can also be incredibly useful in applications that accompany physical therapy.
Wrapping up
Designing healthcare UI is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of your target audience, their needs, and capabilities. Here’s a quick recap of points to consider that we’ve discussed:
- the needs of your users, be it patients, doctors, or hospital staff;
- accessibility features;
- usability;
- consistent and intuitive design, efficient use of colors, adjusted fonts, etc.;
- interactivity; and
- extensive usability testing.
Between these and all the technology trends to potentially implement, designing an effective and captivating UI can be quite a feat on your own.
The good news is — we’re here to help! If you’re wondering how to design and develop a healthcare app, contact us and book a personal consultation.
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About the author:
Mary Stadnik, Strategic Partnerships Lead, UK at Eastern Peak
As a highly experienced and motivated business development leader, Mary helps build mutually beneficial relationships with Eastern Peak’s clients through technology innovation, strategy development and professional guidance to deliver stellar products both globally and locally in the UK.
