HEALTHTECH
MOBILE APP
My Contribution
UI Design
Market research
The Team
1 x Product Designer
Chronic diseases can be both physically and financially draining. Patients often face financial difficulties while accessing medical treatments, medicines, and rehabilitation services. The economic ripple effects of this can be quite damning especially for patients from low income backgrounds.
In my quest to test my design and problem-solving skills, the 'Ava' concept was designed. Ava (Ava loosely means life in Hebrew) is a mobile app that helps patients with chronic diseases to find and access financial aid from various sources, including government and private grants, insurance benefits, and friends & family donations. The app was designed with the aim of making the process of finding financial aid resources easier, faster and more accessible for patients.
My goal was to translate my idea into the simplest form of UI that simultaneously maximises ease of use and exposes fully the main functionalities of the app.
Gathering useful information through research
Though I’ve had a first-hand view of the economic impact of chronic illnesses on families, I needed to understand the problem from a wider perspective and I’d usually rely on academic literature in cases like this. Thankfully I found a paper written by Yun-Hee Jeon et al. titled ‘Economic hardship associated with managing chronic illness: a qualitative inquiry.’ It afforded me some understanding about the problem and the recommendations shaped my design.
Inspired by a similar model
Aggregating funding opportunities is not a new concept. However, to understand how to design the entire experience, I needed to find a problem of equal or a bigger size and see how the creators of the solution thought through it. Thankfully, I found a video on Bloomberg New Economy’s YouTube channel that featured Amira Yahyaoui, the founder of Mos. Mos is simply “the way smart students get money for college.” I loved one statement from Amira that helped me design the first version of Ava:
”Not only did we solve people’s problems, but we solved ‘THE’ problem. Meaning Mos has defined how college funding should work, rather than fighting against how bad the problem is.”
Here's how that insight translated into my concept design:
Caregivers play an essential role in the lives of some patients, so it is important that the assistance they provide extends across all important areas of the patient's life. So, I included a 'caregiver' path in the sign up process to enable this relationship in the app as well.
Legally, patients often require the appointment of proxies to carry out certain administrative tasks. This has also been included in the app.
Ava proved to be a good opportunity to advance my problem solving skills. Thankfully, it has featured a few times in my employer’s (software agency) sales pitch to startups and growth-stage companies in the health industry. I hope to keep my interest in this space and who knows, a startup may spring up out of this!