Healthy Families
web & mobile experience | Kaiser permanente
Today, there are many resources and tools in place for individuals but few are designed for the family unit. Healthy Families is an exploratory project that investigates how Kaiser Permanente can better support the family unit to work as a team to achieve their health goals.
My Role & Team
Project & Design Lead
Led the exploration of digital experiences, including designs for low and high-fidelity prototypes. This included the design strategy, UX and UI designs as well as specifications for development.
I also managed external contractors to oversee the technical development of the prototypes and project website.
Team
I worked with another UX designer and a design strategist. We also worked with external contractors to create the prototype and communication tools for this project.
Challenge
Re-imagine the member portal to help families engage in healthy habits
Kaiser Permanente focuses on the total health of their members. The member-facing portal, kp.org, and most of the resources available to support members in healthy behaviors were designed from the perspective of helping individuals. Previous research established that individuals are influenced by their peers and families. Its hard to establish healthy habits in isolation and that individuals need to be surrounded by others who are also engaged in the same behavior in order to be successful.
This project focuses on re-imaging the portal experience towards families and how KP can support families to start and maintain healthy habits.
Constraints
- Research, design and development occurred in 3 months.
- Each team member juggled other projects at the same time.
- External contractors were engaged at different parts of the project and needed to be rapidly brought up to speed.
Process
RESEARCH
To better understand how young families approach healthy eating, we visited five families in their homes, chronicling their behaviors and routines. We also tried out small, behavioral experiments with ten families through a mobile app called dScout. Each week, families tried out a new eating behavior and shared their success and struggles through photos, videos and stories.
From our research, we learned not only what families do on a day-to-day basis to support healthy eating, but what their key drivers were in their current routines and behaviors. We compiled the research and created personas to guide us during the design & exploration phase.
EXISTING TOOLS & RESOURCES
We also looked at KP's existing tools that members engage with. These included kp.org, the member-facing portal, as well as surveys and questionnaires used at the clinic visit.
DESIGN
We iterated our ideas through user stories, to ensure that the concepts are grounded in a holistic experience. Many click-through prototypes were created to explore how KP can encourage healthy eating through a variety of channels, particularly through its member portal, kp.org. Armed with these prototypes, we held feedback sessions with parents and stakeholders to build upon these new experiences and ensure they are built upon current KP pathways.
I created several wireframe prototypes using Balsamic and Keynote to help make the experience tangible. Prototypes explored user scenarios in the domains of encouraging healthy eating habits, access to KP resources as well as tying these experiences into the clinic visit.
My Healthy Family
RESULT
This project was shared to inspire and inform the strategy of core functional departments within Kaiser Permanente. The Healthy Family experience was also exhibited to internal and external audiences at the Garfield Innovation Center, summer of 2014.
myhealthyfamily.kp.org
Through an interactive prototype, we show how an integrated digital experience supports the family's health and wellness, through concepts grounded in key behavior change, and built upon existing member interactions with their health provider. This includes a vision of a patient-facing family portal, see a holistic view of their clinical and wellness goals as well has track their clinical history.
In the prototype, people can follow the experience of the Sanchez family, as they go through key touch points with Kaiser Permanente: 1) booking an appointment, 2) reviewing lab results and 3) making goals and tracking progress.
Healthy Families Project Website
Communicating the Experience & Behavior Change Concepts
An interactive website was built to communicate the learnings from our research, key opportunities for design and immerse our stakeholders in our concepts through walk throughs of the prototypes. This website as well as the myhealthyfamily.kp.org prototypes were shared widely internally as well as externally at the Garfield Innovation Center exhibit.
The website delineates key behavior change principles and how they were used to support the persona family, Sanchez family, in their journey to improve their overall health in partnership with Kaiser Permanente.
