UX Best Practices for Your Healthcare Startup’s App

Take a couple of our advanced healthcare app design tips and call us in the morning.

Have you chosen a specific niche or what? That’s a good thing. Crafting user experiences that truly resonate with both healthcare professionals and patients is hard. Healthcare App Development Startups encounter a unique set of challenges, from navigating the maze of regulatory compliance to safeguarding sensitive patient data. Good for us both that we have ample experience in advanced healthcare app design. We’ve already faced all of your obstacles before and came through. Takeaway? Specifics are important. But getting your user experience (UX) right is king.

The Importance of User Experience (UX) in a Healthcare App Startup

Let’s not kid ourselves - a lot of it has to do with creating visually pleasing interfaces. But more important is the user journey. What features should healthcare apps have? It encompasses the journey users undertake while interacting with your application, be it a healthcare professional using it to streamline clinical workflows or a patient seeking health-related information.

Understanding the UX Ecosystem

For healthcare startups, the UX ecosystem is a complex one. Such is the nature of the industry you are in. To address these intricacies effectively, it's essential to break down the critical components of UX in healthcare apps.

Intuitive and easy-to-remember user experience

At the top of the list of successful healthcare app lies a user-friendly design. Healthcare professionals and patients should be able to navigate your application effortlessly, and complex medical information must be presented in an easily digestible manner. If both groups can’t get their bearings and are having trouble knowing where to go after repeatedly using the platform, something’s wrong with your assumptions and solutions. If it’s not like second nature after a few days, you have work to do.

Healthcare - a place where Data security goes to be strict

This part is sort of specific for the industry. Although there are systems that are even more strict (think banking and defense), keeping it all super safe is a must unless one wants to start facing legal problems fairly quickly. Data security and patient privacy are paramount in healthcare app design. With regulations like HIPAA in place, we better prioritize the safeguarding of your app’s sensitive patient data. You can lose the trust of your users only once.

Features Tailored to Healthcare Needs

There are very specific needs in this industry. Appointment scheduling, video consultations, prescription management and seamless access to health records are just the basics of what professionals and patients expect from your app.

We have ample hands-on experience with healthcare startups, and here we’ll break it down into features that ensure a holistic approach to app development.

Appointment Scheduling and Video Consultations

Once state-of-the-art fancy options, appointment scheduling and video consultations are now bear-bone features of modern healthcare apps. They provide convenience and accessibility, enhancing the overall experience. They also show that you mean business. But there’s a caveat: these two are also potential UX black holes that can make or break your entire business. Correctly designed, these features streamline the process of seeking medical assistance and foster a sense of control and engagement. Can we get them right? Yes, we can.

Integration with Electronic Health Records (EHR)

This is not a must for every healthcare app startup, but building in the mechanics just in case your requirements change in the future simply makes sense. We’d probably do this for ourselves if it were us building this thing. So yeah, it most likely makes sense for you as well. Seamless integration with electronic health records assures most up-to-date patient data, streamlining the work of professionals and improving patient care.

Prescription Management

This turned out to be a bigger deal than anyone thought. While doing initial research for healthcare app development with another client, we gauged the importance of this feature as moderate. Turned out that users really, really like it when a third party healthcare app does prescription management and has access to prior health records. Medication management gives patients a piece of mind, and healthcare professionals can easily access vital patient information, improving the quality of care.

Patient Privacy

Yes, this is the second time we’re mentioning this, and with good reason. At the heart of your startup’s journey lies data security and patient privacy. And it's an ongoing commitment. Making sure you are not getting sued for a quadrillion dollars or ending up with a raging mob on your porch requires continuous effort. That means regular audits, updates, and staff training. We’ve done it and it’s a hard requirement, albeit a manageable one.

Health tracking & Health tips

This is where you become a true health companion. If users can monitor their well-being and receive guidance on staying healthy within the app, you’ve basically fulfilled your primary function and kept the main promise. We’ve implemented health tracking with great success in the form of Mood tracking for a healthcare app startup’s psychedelic teletherapy platform, and the feature really rocked.

Ratings and reviews

Once we do our job well, it would be a shame to miss out on this free trust relaying opportunity. Ratings and reviews provide social proof, credibility and trustworthiness of an app or service, ultimately influencing users' decision to engage with us. A noteworthy second function: they serve as user-generated feedback, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, enabling developers to enhance our healthcare mobile app development capabilities.

Chatbots or AI Assistants

Of course, we had to include some AI magic, c’mon. It might remain a buzzword, but when applied correctly… you know. It beats everything else out there and beats it properly. Integrating chatbots or AI assistants will provide instant support and answers to user inquiries, enhancing the accessibility of your app. Making you a knight in shining armor during the process, a true winner for your users. If you get it right. We got it right by implementing Sendbird on the mentioned psychedelic teletherapy platform.

Tech Adoption

A lot of new tech tends to trend its way into nothing. We absolutely need to take into consideration everything new out there, but we also need to make smart choices. Will that AR gimmick truly benefit your users? If so, go for it, because it’s not a gimmick anymore. Learning about the user, personalizing suggestions and adapting quickly is where things are going right now. We need to do a proper research to be sure. Up for it?

Accessibility

If there is one industry where we need to make things accessible to everyone, this is it, my dear healthcare app startup. It’s ethical, it’s sustainable and most of the time it’s a legal requirement. We want to make things inclusive with features like screen readers and adjustable font sizes.

Our Approach

To make your healthcare app user-friendly and lucrative, it doesn’t have to be loaded with more features than John Wick has weapons. Every startup has its unique business goals and a specific audience with specific user behavior, which means every startup’s app requires a custom tailored set of features. When developing your UX-optimized app that will deliver results, this is the approach we’ll stick to:

Client inclusion and discovery workshop

A Discovery workshop is the base for a project. In a day or two, you join us for a workshop where we nail down your goals, test different approaches and make sure we’re not heading in the wrong direction with your app. The result? We set a clear product vision and product goals, define the target audience and set up communication guidelines.

Don’t worry, this is not the end of our story, and our communication. We’ll be together in this from start to finish.

Analysis, research, and testing testing testing

Thorough research is a must. We’ll dig out the facts, common issues and best practices until we have the big picture. Analysis helps us identify new opportunities. Testing is like our user satisfaction radar, so we do usability testing really, reaaally often to observe users and upgrade the app. Plus, we do user interviews and surveys to detect user experience pain points and to understand how users feel when interacting with the app.

Iterate. Wax on, wax off. Repeat.

A large part of the winning recipe is being consistent and just grinding it down. The endeavor you’ve decided – it’s no small feat. What we’ll need to do is break it up into manageable sections that will not have our heads explode by trying to solve it all in one go, and then iterate the hell out of this project. It will provide regular feedback which will fuel reality checks and fine tune the whole thing. This is agile development at its best, and although that is a big word that some people throw around lightly, it’s what actually works best. And keeps time expenditure under control.

You can’t write smartest without test

It’s the most masochistic practice in digital. Build something great that you feel immensely proud of and then beat it into a pulp with savage tests in an attempt to prove all that hard work erroneous. But it is better than wishing nothing goes wrong. We take quality assurance dead serious (unlike our blog writing) and go the extra mile to try to find our errors. It takes effort. It’s sometimes annoying. And it truly needs to be done.

Hello. Can you hear me?

We tend to be funny and nice to talk to. Not even kidding. But we’ll also never refrain from saying things that need to be said. And we expect nothing else in return. Advanced healthcare app design doesn’t work unless we achieve a certain level of quality communication. And a prerequisite for that is going all in and speaking your mind. No matter where we are in the process, one thing you can expect is regular updates.

Conclusion: it’s about the inclusion

Inclusion of user-friendly healthcare app features that we know will make the project more successfull. Not because we assumed so, or because we heard it in a fancy workshop, or asked AI about it. Things we’ll end up using will be included because we have proof that they work.

UX challenges for healthcare apps are very specific and rest assured there will be bottlenecks on your journey. But it’s nothing we haven’t successfully navigated before.

There will be some paths that will seem easier along your way, and we know we sound like Gandalf 2.0 here, but think good and hard before you take those. Being a healthcare app startup - of course, you want to reach your goal quickly. What you want to do instead is have someone who’s been on this path before and take all the right steps in the right order. We know how to design a healthcare app and know the niche of healthcare startups. Reaching out would be a wise investment. Let's talk and see where it could take your idea.

HUMAN / September 29, 2023