Summary: Medication tracking for nurses on-the-go (so, all the time)

This was not one of my lengthier projects, but it was one I genuinely felt was a great use of technology. I spent some time mocking up and presenting screens to medical stakeholders for a new nursing app. In hospitals that used our products, nurses carried mobile phones on their hips via a special holster. The phones weren't used for calls, but held an array of medical applications and high security for patient privacy. Apps could notify users of emergency situations or even trigger reminders for special duties, and of course paging and in-hosptial communications.

This particular app allowed nurse's to review patient medication and patient blood level data so they could track thier patient's reactions to medications, ensure their levels were staying stable, and be reminded of any special cases. The key to these kinds of apps is to make them as simple and fast to use use as possible. Nurse's as we all know, are extremely busy and need to get in and out of the app screens quickly. And since I'm not a nurse, close collaboration with our medical practitioner stakeholders was a key.

At the time, iPhones were all the rage due to their snappy OS and first-to-market mobile status. We had a defined UI pattern at the company already, so my role was to layout pages and define any new patterns as needed. If there were new patterns needed I would take them to our larger UX team to discuss. Later, I created a click-through prototype for nurse's to try in usability testing which we conducted in-house. I also created detailed mock-ups with layout call-outs because the development team for this product was in India, which required our mock-ups to have a greater level of detail to ensure results.

Project Outcomes

This was version one of many updates to the app. We felt good about going forward with the screens I had put together due to the positive feedback from the medical practioners (stakeholders) we met with as well as the results from the usability study. Our research team was lucky enough to have a formal testing lab in-house, and upon testing around 5 nurses (3 with prior experience using a similar app and 2 with none) results were overwhelmingly positive on navigation and interpretation of the data they saw onscreen. We nailed it!