As we all know, technology has made several advances in the past decades. It changed the way we communicate with each other, how we acquire products and interact with services in general. One of the areas with the most progress in this shift was healthcare.

Nowadays, we have tools that help us control our health on a day-to-day basis: keeping track of your family members’ health records, checking if the number of steps walked is way behind the goal, if you have taken your pills on time, you name it! There are loads of apps that can be a true help taking care of ourselves or others, mentally and physically.

But the progress made was not only made on the end-user's side. Let’s not forget that there are major ongoing and future changes in digital health, when it concerns healthcare providers, such as doctors, nurses or physicians overall. Some claim that technology might substitute drastically for the job of, for example, doctors.

However, in what concerns my work as a UI/UX designer, I do think technology will replace the repetitive work and leave the true creative, problem-solving and empathetic work for the healthcare providers. That’s what they're truly best at.

As a designer, I see many UI/UX design opportunities for innovation regarding the user experience in healthcare. From disease prevention, well-being, diagnosis or even therapy.

Having this in mind, I’ve selected the top 3 healthcare apps with the best UI/UX design that are making the difference in people's lives.

Your.MD

Your.MD is a health guide and self-care checker app. This healthcare mobile app provides medical help to the user, by using artificial intelligence through a chatbot.

One of the reasons that makes it a great app, is the fact that it gives detailed and customised feedback. This is especially useful when the user (patient) is confused and needs an answer. Skimming through endless search results, full of myths and half-truths can only let one anxious.

Overall, Your.MD has a clean user interface, with teal green, white and smoke colours - giving a calming effect. This works also as a standout from the overload of blue coloured apps. In addition, it's easy to navigate as the main page is defined into sections:

How can I help you today?;

Health journal;

Health plans;

Apple a day.

Plus, it uses a very simple bottom navigation menu (with 3 destinations) that allows the user to quickly jump to the chatbot mode (main feature). With this tool, it’s possible to get feedback on a wide range of symptoms, tests or ask a straightforward question.

When it comes to legibility, Your.MD has a great balance between font size and the remaining elements. This is partly due to the selection of Open Sans - a typeface with clear open forms, optimised for web and mobile interfaces, proved to have an excellent legibility. This aspect is crucial.

When designing an healthcare app such as this one, we need to take into consideration that we have a vast group of users, with different capacities, from visual acuity to physical ability.

Another good feature of this typeface is that, besides having been widely used (and so tested), it has a friendly appearance.

Medisafe

Medisafe is in its core a medication reminder app. The app has a main focus group, mostly patients, but also caregivers and other healthcare providers.

What makes it a great app is the fact that it provides all the detailed info and reminders for such simple, yet meticulous actions, such as taking a pill. One of the most common reasons why medication is not effective, is because it’s often forgotten. Luckily for patients with long-term medication, this can be a stress reliever from the everyday medication.

Overall, it has a clean and simple UX/UI design. The main page can be customised (timeline, daily division in squares or daily division in a circle) that best suits the user. However, the best designed ones are the two latter, since they mimic the conventional pill boxes (specially helpful for users transitioning from that conventional solution).

Additionally, Medisafe gives several options for the user to visually customise the pill’s shape and colour, which is a great visual cue for recognition and memorisation of the pill to take, even before having to look into its name.

Jinga Life

Jinga Life is an app that connects patients with their caregivers, care managers, as well as their family and friends. Our front-end development and UI/UX design teams, worked together to ensure that the app could be used across all platforms and in many different contexts, answering to a specific challenge.

What makes it great is its clarity and intuitiveness that don’t leave room for doubt. Also, it takes into true consideration the user - being a caregiver requires attention to detail. It requires that one takes care of another person - to be able to read between the lines, understanding not only what the person says but how it acts. Besides that, keeping notes of pills' prescriptions, doctor’s appointments and everyday symptoms isn’t easy to track.

In this sense, Jinga Life excels as a healthcare mobile app for having a clear and intuitive navigation. The user can quickly insert info into the platform, while doing other activities simultaneously.

UI/UX design for healthcare mobile apps

Designing healthcare products requires a great responsibility, and with that comes great focus on the user. People’s healthcare is at the core of such apps, so UX/UI design needs to be at its best.

Here at Imaginary Cloud we developed a Product Design Process (PDP) to make sure that we deliver the best product possible.

Our UI/UX design team is highly focused on the user needs and values combining them with the desired features. This way, we can ensure not only a great user adoption but also guarantee that the project goals are met.

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