OVERVIEW

Earlier this year I was approached by an agency I used to work for. They asked me to help them refine an app that focused on heart attacks and making public laws that would help to save lives.

One of the municipalities from Queretaro, Mexico, wanted to bring better health care responses to the specific events of heart attacks, by collecting data. Up until this point, they were managing data collection via surveys. The medical staff involved in attending a heart attack would fill the information they remembered, guess times, etc. This data needed to be more reliable to help make decisions that could impact people’s lives.

THE PROBLEM

The organization needed a fast, reliable way to collect data related to attending heart attack incidents in the city of Queretaro. It was important that it would not intrude on the paramedics activities.

the goal

Find a way to design an app that will be used to register events in real time and help the paramedics do their job more efficiently.

tHE Process
first prototype

I jumped into this project in the design phase, where the user stories, etc. were already laid out and the first version of wireframes was already tested.

With this information in hand we (a team of two designers and me) proceeded to refine the wireframes, and user flows.

Part of the process was to review, learn, and refine the wireframes with medical staff who would be using the app. Once we were happy with the results of the wireframes we did a high fidelity prototype and and tested it with paramedic staff.

iterate

As it turned out, some of the buttons weren’t reading as interactive interface elements, we were still assuming some stuff that didn’t work for the user, we also discovered some other issues that could help to achieve the final goal of the project. That was when we moved into our final iteration (taking into account all this feedback).

our approach

We needed big buttons that displayed information that might be helpful to the paramedics without much scanning.

And finally, we added some components that the paramedics found useful, like visual queues for the BPM.

Here is a little micro interaction we designed for the after attention survey:

the solution

Along with a web app, this mobile app will help paramedics register all their actions without feeling like they’re adding overhead to their work. In the process, we can help them to better attend to their patients.

And after all this information is analyzed, politicians can start to use the data to propose laws that will help to improve the survival rate of heart attack patients.

Results

I would love to share some information about the project but sadly the data is protected due privacy, and the app is only accesible through an existing account.