Introduction 🌟
HealthBeats is a health technology company offering a Remote Vitals Monitoring (RVM) platform for hospitals and clinics. The platform enables healthcare providers to remotely monitor patients’ vital signs, supporting proactive and continuous care from the comfort of the patients’ homes.
Background
While clinicians can monitor key metrics such as heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen levels, they lacked insight into patients’ actual experiences and well-being. This gap made it challenging to deliver truly patient-centered care and manage long-term conditions effectively.
The Patient Feedback Survey module was designed to capture patients’ self-reported health and experiences, giving providers richer context alongside vital signs. This enabled more informed decisions, better care adjustments and a holistic understanding of patient health.
My Role 👩🏻💻
• Designed the end-to-end patient-facing mobile experience (iOS & Android), creating an intuitive and approachable feedback solution tailored to elderly patients.
• Delivered the quick Patient Feedback Survey solution in 2 months, enabling hospitals to capture meaningful patient outcomes beyond vital measurements.
Impact 🚀
Patients: Patients can easily report their well-being and health status through quick and accessible surveys designed to share feedback with their providers with minimal effort.
Healthcare Providers: Providers gain valuable insights beyond vital signs, enabling them to better monitor patients’ overall health, understand their experiences and deliver patient-centered care.
User Feedback: The HealthBeats platform captures Admission, Discharge and Transfer (ADT) information for patients, supporting future reporting and analysis and enhancing the ability to track and improve patient outcomes.
The Problem ⚠️
To address this gap, the team aimed to introduce Patient Feedback Surveys, which are short, structured surveys where patients self-report their health status, symptoms or mood.
The challenge was to design surveys that were approachable, not overly clinical and simple to use, especially for older adults while remaining accurate and reliable enough to support clinical decision-making.
Designing with Users In Mind ❤️
I relied on secondary research and benchmarking to guide design decisions.
Literature Review: Research shows that older adults perform best with 10-point verbal analogue formats (10VAF) paired with visual cues, which improve clarity and reduce bias.
Benchmarking: Analysed how other health apps designed self-report experiences and feedback flows.
Accessibility Standards: Reviewed WCAG and iOS/Android guidelines for touch targets, contrast and readability to ensure usability for older adults. These insights emphasised designing interfaces that are visually clear, emotionally intuitive and simple yet reliable.
Designed for clarity and usability, following accessibility standards for older adults.
Shaping the Right Questions 💡
Drawing on research insights, we developed “How Might We” (HMW) questions to guide the design of the survey module:
Making Surveys Easy to Use
I explored multiple approaches for capturing survey responses including sliders, numeric scales, emojis and text labels.
After evaluating each option for clarity, ease of use and data reliability, a combined emoji and text format emerged as the optimal solution:
•Familiar and quickly understood by patients
•Easy to tap and interact with, especially for elderly users
•Provides quantifiable data that providers can use to inform decisions
From Concepts to Screens
Emoji + Text Scale: Large and high-contrast icons paired with clear labels for quick and intuitive responses.
Mobile-Friendly Layout: Compact pop-up survey designed to be completed in under one minute.
Accessible Touch Targets: Enlarged buttons and ample spacing to support easy interaction, especially for older users.
Non-Clinical Look: Vibrant and friendly visuals that create a welcoming and approachable experience.
Outcome 🎉
The Patient Feedback Survey module was integrated into the HealthBeats Mobile App as a lightweight pop-up survey, triggered at key points in the care journey, such as post-discharge or during regular monitoring.
This design led to higher response rates, as the simple and quick format encouraged more patients to complete surveys compared with traditional, longer formats.
•Patients found the surveys easy to complete and non-burdensome, supporting continued engagement.
•Clinicians received timely and relevant feedback, providing actionable insights to better understand patient well-being and adjust care plans accordingly.
Key Takeaways 📚
This project reminded me how crucial it is to design with empathy, especially for older adults and patients with varying levels of tech familiarity. By considering their perspectives including cognitive function, mobility and comfort with technology, we were able to create designs tailored to their needs. I saw firsthand how thoughtful design can make collecting health data simple for patients while still providing valuable insights for clinicians.