Background

Traditional Physical Therapy clinics have a big gap in when and how a patients access their Physical Therapist (PT). We wanted to broaden access to Physical Therapists and allow our clinics to connect with patients in an ongoing basis. During an injury but also before and afterward. We wanted to build a MVP to test the idea and needed a complete spec with a mock to give to contractors for bidding.

Time Frame

The product planning phase was 1 week long and the design phase was 1 and half weeks long.

Process

First we started with identifying the gaps between what users need and what PT’s offer. We also took into account what we would be able to accomplish with a tight budget and deadline as this started as an exploratory idea. Due to the nature of the deadline, I went from sketches to full-resolution mocks. For the hand off to contractors I put together a comprehensive specification doc outlining in detail each page’s purpose, actions, interactions, and logic.

Challenges

The time frame for this project was especially difficult as I was also managing the engineering team and iterating on another project. In order to meet the deadline required, I focused on cutting down features and designing pages that could be built by the engineering team chosen for the contract, instead of designed my me (i.e. settings pages). I also felt a bit overwhelmed with all the data we would need from the user so I made a spreadsheet of all the data needed for each page and added to it or cut out features that required too much extra effort from us or our users.

Success

This project helped us take Physical Therapy care from a one time deal, to a life long relationship. It meant that not only were we able to provide improved care but also increase our life time value per patient. The design has been well received by users and investors. We are currently tracking its success by adoption rate and recency of use.

Areas for Improvement

The display of the user’s wellness data needs to be improved along with the way users log their data into our system. I would also like to revisit the typography, there are some styles that differ from page to page. I also think the left hand nav needs a re-think. The graphical nature will limit its growth. The onboard experience also needs to be better fleshed out.