PWA Retrospective | UX By Diana

PWA "RETROSPECTIVE"

Takeaways

There is a sweet spot between freedom and restriction.

From assessing competitor downfalls, interviews, and survey results, it became clear that users need to be able to explore and discuss topics freely without being restricted by a platform’s design. For example, many users complained that other platforms were too siloed and broke out information and discussion into separate sections. This limited a user’s ability to easily learn and explore relevant topics in one space.

However, we also realized that an overly open structure enables too much freedom, making the platform feel disorganized and chaotic. Therefore, we decided to organize content through a simple tagging system where all users would see content in the same place (their home feed). However, the content would be structured and made relevant by only showing content with tags that relate to their profile (conditions, topics followed, etc).

Users want a sense of warmth when it comes to health services.

Many users found our initial branding and site design to feel too clinical, “almost sterile.” Since users were coming to our site to consume content that could impact their health, it became clear we needed to make adjustments to both maintain a sense of assurance, but also to instill an integral feeling of friendliness and warmth.

When it came to addressing these issues, we found our research to suggest that taking on a rebrand and UI redesign would equip us with the right conditions to really bake a sense of compassion into our UI and achieve the simultaneously professional yet approachable tone we were failing to deliver at that time. Users validated these insights through very positive responses, expressing that the site now felt both professionally credible and caring.

Shortcuts and team consistency are paramount.

I began working with very manual processes, which quickly became cumbersome when creating our features and design system. Collaborating with our front-end designer who is very familiar with UX practices, I was able to learn several shortcuts and methods that drastically expedited my design work.

I also gained more familiarity with different design practices that, if not accounted for during collaboration, can lead to inconsistencies across the product. For example, I initially made the mistake of manually designing core elements such as buttons, dropdowns, and page sections for every new feature page. Our front-end designer helped me take on the better practice of creating reusable design components that could be used across every relevant feature page.

Thankfully we caught on pretty early, but I had still created more work for myself as I had to go back and replace various assets after creating detailed feature design pages. Overall, owning the design process from start to finish allowed me to take away good lessons in adopting UX best practices.

Always advocate for accessible design.

This was my first experience conducting UX research from concept to delivery of a full product release. It was really rewarding seeing it come to life on the live platform and getting positive feedback from excited users as we solved their problems.

However, our team was sadly not yet able to implement many of the ideas we had for making our platform more accessible given our limited resources. This was particularly unfortunate given the nature of our users being people with chronic illness. Looking back, I may have pushed more to include accessible design as a must-have in our product before launch.

Testimonial

John Rim

Co-Founder, CPO

Manager

Syndio Health | USA

PWA "RETROSPECTIVE"

Takeaways

Testimonial

John Rim

Beta

PWA

CMS