Client
Objective
Improve the usability of Visionable’s video consultation tool to drive customer acquisition and adoption. The focus was on simplifying the interface and language for ease of use, while maintaining compliance with NHS data protection and clinical safety standards.
Role
Lead UX Designer overseeing another designer, responsible for discovery, ideation, and prototyping. I partnered closely with Visionable’s internal product team and NHS stakeholders to align user needs with clinical and organisational priorities.
Outcome
Delivered a new Flutter-native app that reimagined Visionable’s core product to resolve usability issues and support tailored clinical use cases—laying the foundation for improved adoption and scalable implementation across healthcare settings.
Patients
Many patients face mobility challenges or may have weakened immune systems so going into the hospital poses risks. Remote consultations will help to lessen the strain on Clinicians and keep at-risk patients out of hospitals, safe from their own homes.
Specialists
Specialists are not in abundance and are generally restricted by travel, so they need a tool to enable remote triage and real-time collaboration, to achieve quicker and better outcomes for patients.
Conducted a thorough review of the existing product alongside user feedback to identify key usability pain points and improvement opportunities.
Collaborated with Project Managers to define user personas based on stakeholder insights and service needs.
Developed an interactive prototype to enable early usability testing and gather actionable feedback.
Gathering known pain points
"If I turn my video off, the feed disappears and it looks like i've left the call."
Understanding our users
"We're designing for the whole country, not just the ones who are used to using the web. The people who most need our services are often the people who find them the hardest to use."
Government Design System
In a healthcare context, especially within primary care, the user base is broad and diverse. To begin understanding user needs, we first mapped key use cases to capture the range of contexts in which the product would be used:
Specialist Clinicians who remote triage with Paramedics in the ambulance.
Clinicians conducting remote consultations with patients.
Clinicians and Specialists attending multi-disciplinary teams meetings (internal).
Patients attending GP remote consultations, and group clinics.
Challenge
The diversity in age, gender, mobility, culture, and visual/hearing impairments posed a challenge in defining our personas. A patient using our platform could be an elderly woman with low technological savviness in a Fragility Ward, or a middle aged cancer patient with learning disabilities in the Urology Ward. We always strive for accessibility when designing, however, when working with the NHS it is imperative.
Solution
We decided to innovate the traditional persona structure by creating a sliding scale of key attributes inspired by Microsoft's Persona Spectrum. The sliding scale enables us to focus on motivations rather than demographic information which rely on biases and perpetuate stereotypes associated with a name, gender, ethnicity, and class...
Designing a product for people with impairments or disabilities can actually enhance the experience and usability for all users.
Feature prioritisation
Challenge
The original product included an overwhelming number of settings and technical options, many of which were overly complex or irrelevant to our defined personas. These features were often based on the assumption that clinical expertise equates to technological proficiency—an assumption that did not hold true across all user groups.
Solution
Initially, we aimed to create a brand new platform, however, it became apparent that we could use a more hybrid approach to maintain the unique technology.
We decided to strip some of the technical features and simplify the visual language of wording and symbols to be more accessible.
Future proofing
Given the ambitious widespread application of the product, we wanted to ensure to account for future use cases. Some of the variations between each use case could include; one-to-one calls and group calls, no screen shares and multiple screen shares, connected devices, continuous monitoring, private calls, etc...
Ways of working
It was important to involve the development teams early to establish a genuinely agile process. This allowed us to communicate the product vision while avoiding wasted effort on features that might not be technically feasible.
Through this process, I learned that handover expectations vary significantly between development teams. We worked with two: an external team, unfamiliar with the product, required detailed, high-fidelity designs and thorough documentation. In contrast, the internal team preferred a more collaborative and iterative approach, relying less on intricate specs and more on ongoing communication and co-creation.
Information architecture
We developed a hierarchical information diagram to ensure logical placement of the video consultation tool within Visionable’s broader service ecosystem. This was especially important given the growing number of products—such as Remote Ward Monitoring—and the need for a coherent user experience across the platform. The structure was informed by a card sorting exercise, helping us align the information architecture with user expectations and mental models.
User validation
To validate our designs, I developed a comprehensive user testing brief and partnered with a Senior Product Manager to conduct testing sessions with a urologist, a patient, and a nurse. The brief included testing hypotheses, pre- and post-task questions, a structured script, and interactive prototypes tailored to each user scenario.
One of the key challenges was participant recruitment. Due to NHS policies prohibiting staff from accepting gifts, we were unable to offer standard incentives like gift cards. This required us to rely on internal networks and stakeholder support to secure participation from clinical staff.
Actionable outcomes:
Features
"I can’t think of a reason why an individual would take a screenshot."
"Double clicking on one of the screens to enlarge would be much more intuitive."
"Poor quality hardware, poor quality broadband, can’t get microphones or laptops to work – every Multi-disciplinary Teams meeting has huge issues."
Final MVP designs
These designs intend to move away from a static conference tool to a collaborative and interactive multi-faceted online workspace.
The idea of an interactive workspace means you can amalgamate not only your meetings but also patient records, devices, and messages all in one place to enhance collaboration between Clinicians and ultimately access essential information to aid informed clinical decisions.