Empathy is one of the most widely discussed topics in product design and user experience in the healthcare industry. As technology rapidly develops, it has several impacts on consumer care. In terms of healthcare products, applying empathy means having the ability to understand and uncover what people need and implementing what we discover.
In 2018, Softheon experienced great opportunities and success in understanding and supporting our partners and product users. During Open Enrollment 2019, Softheon’s Marketplace portal supported over 32K active renewals and initial enrollments, which is approximately a 97% increase from last year.
This growth was fueled with Softheon’s added features to the Marketplace portal. With assistance from our partners, Softheon added features to support additional household situations that our users are part of and provided the platform our clients can use to help their membership. These new solutions were based on Softheon’s true understanding of both our clients’ daily operational needs and how to optimize every user’s shopping experience to support more household scenarios.
As we can see its amazing impact, activities of applying empathy to the product is crucial. Four critical steps of this is as follows;
- Define & Observe – Apply empathy to identify the problems. Is the shopping experience accessible to a wide range of population? Do users want to access their account via mobile devices? Can our client assist their membership efficiently and in a timely manner?
- Gather & Visualize – Identify user groups and visualize data collected for potential target audiences. Create personas, conduct interviews, surveys, and focus groups to understand and discover users’ points of view. Include data collection factors such as environment settings, motivation, tech proficiency, and demographics.
- Wireframe/ Prototype – Proceed with product design and create prototypes based on collected data. Actively share to receive feedback from partners to gain additional insight.
- Product Implementation – Perform development best practices, such as applying accessibility (including 508, ADA, and WCAG) and responsiveness at the time of development and adding to the testing pipeline.
As adoption and usage of technology continues to grow in the health industry, empathy is no longer merely a management or psychological term, but a necessity component for a product. A truly emphatic product allows users to get better access to healthcare information, complete their shopping experience with fewer clicks, manage their healthcare enrollment account in a self-serving manner, and makes healthcare available, affordable, and accessible to all.
If you would like more information or would like to schedule a demo of our products, reach out to our team of experts at info@softheon.com.
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