KP Moves

Responsive Web App

KP Moves is part of Project Move - a broader Kaiser Permanente initiative to support and encourage physical activity for KP members. KP Moves is a web app that helps patients find activities that fit their daily life. It’s integrated with the patient clinic visit, as well as accessible for patients on-the-go. 

Project Move, along with KP Moves, was piloted in a public beta at two Kaiser Permanente (KP) pilot sites, Torrance Clinic in SCAL and Rockwood Clinic in NW.  

My Role & Team

Lead Designer

I oversaw and managed the KP Moves application, from conception to a public beta release. This included:

The Team

The main team was composed of a user researcher, a service designer and design generalist, with myself leading the technology implementation of the project.  I also managed contractors content development work. An external development team worked with us to implement the KP Moves application.

Challenge

Inspire members to be active

Research has shown that health is driven by multiple factors that are intricately linked – of which medical care is one component. As an integrated pre-paid health system, Kaiser Permanente (KP) is in a unique position to demonstrate that affordability in health care can be achieved by disease prevention. Hence, KP has many efforts to make patient's lives better by promoting healthy behaviors.

Past research from in-home interviews with members and clinic visit observations, show that members are motivated to be active but challenged due to physical, financial and environmental constraints. Furthermore, care providers are not trained to provide advice regarding physical activity but they firmly believe that exercise provides direct health benefits to their patients.

From Hack-a-thon to Pilot

Birth of the KP Moves project

At an internal hackathon, the KP leadership challenged us to connect KP members to local resources.  I took up the challenge and with a small team, quickly reviewed organization research and interviewed stakeholders to help us identify key pain points in the KP member’s experience. I created wireframes and worked with a few developers to create a working prototype of a physical activity app. We gave a demo of the prototype along with scenarios that demonstrate how it could be used within and outside the patient visit.

Our executives were thrilled with the prototype and the potential value it could bring to KP clinicians and members - so much so that they provided support to fully develop a product with the goal of piloting it at a few clinic sites.

Defining Product Direction

Onsite Research

We went back to the initial research to tease out other key design directions for the product. We created story boards that described ways in which members can explore and act upon physical activities. Armed with the story boards and the hack-a-thon prototype, we spent time in the clinic waiting rooms to get member feedback.  

During our clinic visits, we encountered a wide-range of members and their perspectives around physical activity. For example, people with physical limitations were unsure what is safe for them to do without hurting themselves. Parents revealed that they were too busy juggling work and family to fit in physical activity. However, many members trust their care provider for advice - especially if their care provider encourages physical activity to improve their health.

Based on our project scope and access to existing resources, we decided to build a physical activity tool for busy professionals and families with young children.

Behavior Change Design

Guerrilla User Testing

Most members see running and going to the gym as primary forms of exercise and are often discouraged because these activities don’t fit their budget, time or fitness level.

Using this as our key design direction, we created more user stories that explore how members can receive personalized suggestions for physical activities. I created rough click-through prototypes that explored ways to get personalized directions. We took these prototypes back to clinic waiting rooms for feedback, quickly iterating until we had a strong product direction.

Think-Aloud User Testing

We set up focused user-testing with KP members to helped us refine the content and functionality.  I created new user flows and interactive prototypes for the testing sessions and trained our project team members how to run a user testing session. KP members came to our testing facility and went through a series of tasks using an interactive prototype.

Testing Goals

• Investigate if the product was it easy to use

• Validate if the app provided valuable physical activity recommendations

• Learn if the content and application inspires action

Responsive Design

As the product design lead, I defined the final wireframes and information architecture for mobile and desktop versions of kpmoves. I worked with another designer to define the final visual design, tone and content. The goal is to make the app accessible across different devices, so it can be accessible for clinicians and members - in the waiting room and for people on-the-go. 

Personalized Activities

The responsive website dynamically curates community resources and activities based on the member's needs. Users can complete a short questionnaire to get a personalized set of activities or search to quickly get results if they already have an activity in mind.

Discover and Take Action

The app allows members to save activities and resources, create reminders and share via email and SMS to friends and loved ones. Users can also get additional inspiration from similar activities.

Embedded in the Clinic

kpmoves.org was integrated within the clinic workflow as part of the Exercise-as-a-vital-sign initiative. Providers and the care team co-designed with us how they can engage members around physical activity and refer them to kpmoves.org during the clinic visit.  The app was also available through a kiosk in the waiting room.