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Buddy Healthcare: How to design a solution that care personnel and patients would be eager to use

What if your company has developed a great breakthrough solution in the form of an app, trials are starting… and you see that the medical staff and patients are hesitant to use it? People who need to go a hospital procedure may be tired of using new applications for a particular need for just a few days. Care personnel always have a lot on their plate and may also be unwilling to start using some yet another new tool… So we’d like to share some ideas on how the design of the solution becomes one of the factors that encourages stakeholders to use it.

We have developed BuddyCare, a solution that makes care pathways mobile and saves time and brings a piece of mind both to the care personnel and hospital patients. Nurses spend a lot of time on phone calls with patients before and after important procedures, give them printed instructions. However, patients still tend to be confused about how to prepare and where and when they should appear for the procedure. So instead of sticking to the old-fashioned paper forms, instructions and phone calls, both medical personnel and patients use BuddyCare which automates the communication before and after important procedures. But, how did we design it so that everyone would be encouraged to use the BuddyCare app?

It’s all about “proportional and tonal harmony” when it comes to public desirability level of a product design. At Buddy Healthcare, we don’t believe in Goodness or Badness; however, we do believe in Desirability and Undesirability. That’s where sensation, perception, and recognition procedures of human brain is taken into account as the key components of the design desirability level and the user learning process. The main grammar rule in BuddyCare design language is to transform the user learning process from its ultimate complex level down to habituation level in the shortest possible time. That’s why we are inspired by recognizability features of basic geometrical shapes and psychological properties of popular colours.

We believe the design should be always intuitive enough to fluently guide the user’s brain towards the intended point, and at the same it should be complex enough to feed the user’s brain with gamified procedures and new materials. That’s why on each view of our product, we focus to fluently deliver not more than what the user exactly needs to desirably sense, perceive, and recognize. Beside all these mental considerations, we believe physical abilities and disabilities of the users should be also taken into account as an important aspect. That’s why our design language is formed in a way to provide easy access to majority of our product features; considering different kind of users’ physical conditions. We believe our product should be easily and desirability used by all kind of humans worldwide. There are so many guidelines for achieving such goal, but we are adding our own as well.

If you’d like to discuss this with us or find out more about the BuddyCare solution, meet us at Buddy Healthcare’s booth at Digital Health Nordic 2018 or email us at care@buddyhealthcare.com!

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