An increasing number of healthcare providers are now embracing technology as tool to deliver better service to people. As technology becomes more wide-spread in the healthcare arena, there is a growing need for user-centric or human-centred design in health tech.

When we speak of design, we don’t just mean aesthetically appealing user app interfaces, but in fact a multi-disciplinary or systematic approach that focuses on what value these products and services provide to users, hence the term ‘human-centred design’.

If designers are creating products that are meant for use by humans, it goes without saying that they need to be designed in a way that puts the user at the centre of all design decisions.

This becomes even more essential when it comes to healthcare, because it revolves around humans and the care given to them. The greatest challenges in healthcare are centred at the human level. The recent interest in human centred healthcare is because there has been a surge in the interest and implementation of human-centred design. 

Before we understand what human-centred design in health tech means today, lets understand its evolution.

The Evolution of Human-Centred Design

Human-centred design originated in the 1980s and continued to evolve through the 1990s. The movement began as a human-computer interaction to help product developers, or more specifically to help computer and software development companies to design interfaces and also to understand the roles the user, the software and the hardware play in the overall design process.

Thought the 1990s and the 2000s, human-centred design moved to broadening its scope and focusing on other domains such as product design, user-centred product design and gradually to a more holistic approach that included interface design, system design, product design or process design.

Human-Centred Design in Healthcare Today

Enabling a seamless user journey is the main focus of human centred design in healthcare today. By focusing on the reality of healthcare today, designers can start solving for real world problems that plague users today. Design thinking can help find solutions for problems like convenience, speed, accessibility, choice etc. by leveraging digital tools like mobile, AI and unified digital ecosystems. 

Designers first need to start by defining the problem, rather than chasing health tech trends. They can then take those problem statements, ideate, and co-create with physicians, consumers, and patients on the ideal experiences to solve them. This ensures that designers are not just force-fitting technology but also ensuring that any digital tools they incorporate are actually helping solve the problem.

Essential questions to ask at this step are;

• Who is using the system or application?
• What is the purpose?
• What hurdles could potential users encounter while using the system?
• What could potential users expect from the system?
• What goals might potential users have in mind while using the system?

What Factors Drive Human-Centred Design in Health-tech

Let us understand some of the key factors that drive human-centred design, as co-relating to health tech.

1. Empathy

At the core of human-centred design is the principle of being able to understand and empathise with users needs and challenges. Only by understanding their problems, can designers then try and offer solutions to them. This is the first step towards creating systems that are user-centric. Understanding and empathising with users requires a lot of research which can be challenging, as it requires an enormous amount of resources. But this is effort well spent as it can directly impact user satisfaction.

Designers have a vast number of tools and models that they can deploy to understand their users better.

2. Systems Thinking

Healthcare needs a multi-disciplinary and systematic approach as there are multiple stakeholders involved in the process of delivering a patient with quality healthcare services.

A human-centred design team in health tech therefore is expected to test their ideas across the board, keeping in mind every single stakeholder at every stage of the healthcare delivery service. What this means is that a solution created in one discipline cannot hamper activities in another. And the team needs to be aware of any blockades that may appear and create solutions for them.

3. Ideation and Early Testing

While all ideas may look great in theory, their practicality and user success rate can best be measured by testing them out in real-life situations or by stimulating real life situations to the best of their capability. This is why many human-centred designers employ the engagement of end-users and stakeholders early in their ideation and testing phase. This is the stage where site navigation maps, user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes are created. With health-tech companies, this would involve working with healthcare professionals to test the feasibility of their solutions. 

4. Execution

Execution is the process by which a feasible solution has been created and then actually received by end-users. But the designer’s role is not yet over once the application is in the user’s hands. Designers also need to be mindful of how users are interaction with the system or app and any possible improvements that can be made. Health-tech providers especially need to be even more mindful of how their solution is received and whether or not it is actually solving the problem they set out to solve.

5. Iteration

Designing is a fundamentally iterative process. There are constantly new improvements being made in the field of technology and health tech providers will need to continuously need to collect user feedback and monitor the performance of their solutions in order to make upgrades where necessary.

Thus constant iteration is an unsaid yet critical step in the execution of human-centred design solutions in healthcare.

Now that we know the guiding principles of human-centred design, what are some of the most common problems that users face while interacting with healthcare apps and interfaces?

• Unwelcoming UX
• Lack of Glanceability
• Longer Navigation Times
• Lack of Personalisation
• Users Feel Alienated
• No Motivation to Use the Technology Further

Conclusion

Health-tech has some extremely practical uses in improving our healthcare system. It can provide SOS medical aid, connect patients to doctors, thus eliminating longer wait times, or even be as simple as reminding patients when to re-order their prescriptions. 

But making sure the benefits of modern technology in healthcare can reach everyone in need is no easy feat. The challenges that follow will require massive collaboration between governments, organisations, and people. But the effort will be fruitless if the interface ends up causing more harm than good. That’s where good UX design comes in. 

What human-centred design offers are a means to solve problems by recognising the cause of a problem and understanding the ‘why?’ before addressing anything else. When we focus on answering the right questions and speaking to the right people, we can implement lasting effects for all involved parties. As healthcare becomes more adept at understanding and implementing human-centred design for all, we are getting closer to achieving healthcare that is better for everyone, especially the patients. 

Human-centred thinking should be the default design method of all health-tech companies looking to scale and create lasting impact. Unlike other industries where humans may not be the primary consumer, healthcare is held together by people in various fields who deserve to be included in the design process.