Pre-Design Thinking

We decided to focus on the direct user interactions of Slingshot, where users easily access information on their medical bill savings. As a result, we decided to create a mobile interface for Slingshot, since mobile interfaces are accessible to any smartphone user, for easy, everyday use, and they allow for real-time state monitoring through push notifications.

Because Slingshot is focused around consumer health services, there's a wide range of potential users who would be impacted by our interface:

• Financially stable people with insurance (either through employment or personal payment)
• People who are financially stable often can afford receiving regular medical check-ups when ill, which can be hard to keep up with when the frequency of bills received increases. This demographic could be positively impacted by our prototype in that having a mobile interface for the Slingshot software would make checking for extraneous costs on a large batch of bills received much easier to catch and manage accordingly.
• People who can generally afford care but may be tipped over by a particularly financially strenuous bill would also be positively affected, since having both the Slingshot software and the availability of that software on an easily accessible device like mobile would help to mitigate the adverse effects certain medical bills may have on a user.
• Under-served, uninsured populations
• People like those experiencing poverty, houselessness, disability, chronic illness(es), mental illness(es), etc. would benefit from such a service and interface, as our prototype would provide these users the option of both the technical details of their cost breakdowns and savings, as well as additional information and resources for them to access, all in one application. For those who wouldn’t have a mobile device to access our prototype from would at least be able to access the information Slingshot would provide through any device supporting the receiving of and access to emails.
• People who turn to healthcare services as a last resort or in emergency situations would also benefit from a mobile interface for Slingshot, considering ER bills can be extremely costly and oftentimes more damaging than the medical incident itself. With both the ease of access through a mobile application and the Slingshot software available through that interface, these users would be able to easily view detailed descriptions of what they were charged for like they would from an itemized bill, while simultaneously being able to account for and reduce those charges.

Sketches

We began our iterative design process by having each member create rough sketches for 3 different screens. We didn’t specify what those screens would entail, as we wanted to get an idea of what type of screens each member thought would be the most essential for the prototype. Though some of us had screens that overlapped, we felt that our design concepts overall were substantially different enough to include them in our final sketches. You can find each of our sketches below:

Wireframes

After we finished our rough sketches, we incorporated our sketches (overlapping and separate) with additional features we felt were also relevant to Slingshot’s mission into one set of wireframes with 4 different screens: a “Home” page, a “Bills” page, a “Trends” page, and a “Resources” page. You can find our lo-fi prototype here.

Task

For users to test our prototype, we needed to create a specific task for them to accomplish. We decided on the following:

"Find the cost breakdown of how much you saved in “Physician Services” on your most recently completed bill from RI Hospital."

To complete this task, we broke down a user’s required actions into 4 subtasks:

1. Navigate to the "Bills" page.
2. Click on the “Sort and Filter” dropdown button to sort the “Completed” bills by “Most Recent.”
3. Find the most recently completed bill from RI Hospital.
4. Click on “Emergency Visit, Level 4” under “Physician Services” to see the cost breakdown of what you saved.

With our submission of the prototype to the UserTesting site, we included the following directions for the user to keep in mind:

"Imagine you are a company employee stressed about medical bills from your emergency room visit in September. You want to check if that medical bill has reduced in cost through the Slingshot app on your phone. Your task is to find the cost breakdown of how much you saved in “Physician Services” on your most recently completed bill from RI Hospital. You are encouraged to think aloud as you perform the task so we can better understand your thought process while navigating the site! Please note that this is an interactive mock-up and not an actual mobile application. Some screens (e.g. the Spendings tab in the Trends page) were not actually created or are unreachable through the mock-up."

We also included the following post-test questionnaire:

1. How would you describe your overall experience with the prototype?
2. What, if anything, surprised you about the experience?
3. What, if anything, made you frustrated about the app?
4. What are your thoughts on the design, color, and/or layout?

Results

We had a total of 3 users test our Hi-Fi prototype, with their results and answers to our post-test questionnaire included below:

Analysis

Finally, we analyzed each user testing video by breaking down the subtasks, the errors users had made, overall user performance with the prototype, and iterations we would make for our prototype based on these results:

Overarching Conclusions & Next Steps

All users had a general sense of confidence and navigated with ease. Any errors they came across, they were eventually able to resolve with some exploration.
Based on all the users' feedback and their testing videos, here is what we'd improve upon in future iterations of this prototype:

• Information Clarity
• Specify exactly what the numerical price values on the cards mean
• Organization
• Space footer icons out such that the chances of a user clicking on an icon they did not intend to interact with would be reduced
• Make the header titles more noticeable and attention-grabbing so users can easily deduce where they are in the app
• Mental Models
• Change the ‘Sort and Filter’ button into two separate buttons: one for ‘Filter’ and one for ‘Sort’ to better align with user expectations
• User Populations
• More research will need to be done to further address the needs of those that are in situations where their smartphone use is dependent on aspects like accessibility, financial situation, housing status, or any other factor (what unique issues do they face that we have not designed for in our app?)