Truth, transparency, and identity
Designing a new rating & review platform in healthcare
Toward the end of my design program, I began contracting for an early-stage healthcare startup, Lucid Ratings, which led to a full-time role. As a Product Designer on this scrappy team, I’ve learned a great deal both within my comfort zone (user research and testing, UI design, brand management and designing pitch materials) and outside it (product management, front-end coding, regression testing).
Reflecting on the past ten months, I wanted to share a glimpse into some challenges, successes, and lessons learned as we prepare to launch our product in partnership with Capital Innovators Accelerator.
The crisis of truth, transparency, and identity verification
Our design principles focus on creating a trustworthy, transparent platform that engages both patients and doctors in healthcare ratings and reviews. However, widespread mistrust of information and data privacy wars in tech, make this a challenging problem space to design in.
While secure methods of identity verification (think scanning your ID and taking a selfie) are more accepted in Europe, user testing in the United States revealed that our target audience remains skeptical. It’s exciting to iterate on and work with other top technology companies to launch an innovative product that proves both trustworthy and secure without burdening the user experience with undue friction.
Our team uses the design-thinking process to tackle a few big questions in this area: How does a platform make itself trustworthy and transparent, while respecting users’ hesitancy to scan documents? How might we ensure each review is unique to a verified individual’s experience?
Lessons from ideation and testing
While we brainstormed together on the big-picture, I tackled some ideation exercises on my own, taking research-backed 6–8–5s, user flows, and low-fidelity wireframes directly to users for quick feedback.
As I generated my user testing reports, I stood up for users’ opinions that scanning identification is intrusive and untrustworthy. However, I began to notice patterns consistent with NN/g’s First Rule of Usability.
“Don’t listen to your users” seems a contradictory rule in human-centered product design. However, my testing illuminated a big difference between what users “said” and what they “did.” Although 100% of users “said” they wouldn’t be comfortable with an identity verification process, they clicked through it without hesitation. At the end of the test, they mentioned that the unique security steps in the app made them feel “secure in a way [they’ve] never seen before.”
Balancing the familiar with the unconventional
As we continue to iterate on our identity verification and uniqueness process, I hold onto our value proposition as an organization, remembering to focus on what users “do” rather than “say.” I often have to remind myself that developing a user flow and interface design that others haven’t seen before means finding a balance between the familiar and the unconventional.
Takeaways and next steps
Acting as our Product Manager as well as designer, I keep a close eye on our MVP requirements and user stories, trying to line up minute details with big-picture product strategy as we work through agile sprints.
As we prepare for launch 🚀 , I’m excited to work with beta testers, continue growing my front-end Xaml knowledge, apply the design-thinking process to developing robust review systems, and move our design system from Sketch to Figma. More insights to come!
