If you’ve ever experienced frustration or confusion while using a website or mobile app, you understand the impact that a negative user experience can have. Difficult-to-use platforms can have especially large consequences in the healthcare industry, as these technologies are often crucial to supporting hospital operations. Healthcare tech platforms often require extensive training to adopt, and consumers of these platforms have had to adapt to systems that are inaccessible and frustrating. Any additional time that healthcare employees have to spend interacting with technology is time that could have been spent focusing on patient care, so we can reduce wasted time by building intuitive systems that resolve friction in busy environments.
At Navv, we strive to protect the user and to keep healthcare employees in mind while designing and developing our software. Platforms like NavvTrack are used in a high-pressure setting where there is no time or patience for confusing interfaces, so the technology must be as intuitive and usable as possible to support this environment. Some of the ways we aim to increase usability include focusing on using consistent patterns, following accessible design practices, and incorporating user feedback into our process.
Patterns
Incorporating consistent patterns into our design enables the user to apply their learnings about one section of the application across the entire platform. For example, all of the tables we use throughout NavvTrack follow repeatable patterns of sorting and searching, and although the information presented in each table is different, the general experience is the same. Healthcare employees can quickly gather the data they need from each table without having to waste valuable time relearning the interactions.
Accessibility
Another way we aim to build an intuitive platform is by designing with accessibility standards in mind. To ensure that information in NavvTrack is accessible to our entire user base, we strive to follow the WCAG guidelines for color contrast and text size. For content that is presented in text to be readable, the text and its background must meet a certain color contrast ratio based on its size. In addition, color should not be used as the only way to distinguish a visual element, but rather used in combination with symbols or shapes as a distinguishing factor. By following these recommendations and continuing to incorporate additional accessible design practices into NavvTrack, we can help make healthcare technology available to a larger group of people.
User Feedback
In order to validate that we are building a product that will be useful in a healthcare environment, we seek input from our user base and incorporate that feedback into our design process. Whether this is an initial exploratory interview or a feedback session for an existing feature, gathering input from the people who will be interacting with the product in the field helps us understand how NavvTrack will be used. We plan to incorporate more user research and testing into our process as our user base grows so that we can stay focused on our goal of providing healthcare employees with a valuable platform.
Hospitals are busy, high-pressure environments where technology is a necessary tool, and well-built platforms have the potential to reduce strain and support important operations. However, a poor user experience can have the opposite effect, so it is especially important in healthcare tech to design with the user in mind. Our goal at Navv is to build an intuitive and accessible platform to help ensure that healthcare employees have the tools they need to succeed.
