EYE 2 EYE
Designing a patient self referral portal
Working with an eye care provider to streamline the process of accessing urgent acute eye care. The goal was to design a well-structured and clearly signposted system, so patients can request and receive timely assistance.
My Role
Product Designer
Timeline
3 weeks
Tools
Figma/Figjam
The Problem
How can we help educate patients on how they can access critical eye care?
Eye2Eye, a Maidstone-based opticians offering both routine and acute ophthalmology services, faced the challenge of raising patient awareness about the self-referral option and ensuring that contact information is easily accessible, making it difficult for patients to navigate their services without GP involvement.
Old experience
Addressing these challenges require a user-friendly solution that streamlines the self-referral process for patients with visual impairments, with accessibility as a central focus of the design.
The Results
A faster, clearer path to care
✅
Streamlined Self-Referral Process
Reduced the steps required for patients to self-refer for acute eye care.
✅
Improved User Navigation
Ensuring users can quickly locate and access the self-referral system, minimising confusion and frustration.
✅
Increased Awareness of Self-Referral
Produced a clear and accessible self-referral pathway.
The Process
Simplifying the path to receiving urgent eye-care
In just three weeks, I conducted user research to identify pain points, defined the patient journey with a clear problem statement, designed low-fidelity wireframes to streamline the self-referral process, and tested the prototype to improve navigation and accessibility.
Stakeholder interview
Identifying the business goals
From the stakeholder discussion, the client highlighted significant confusion from patients in the existing referral pathways and emphasised the need to streamline the process for acute cases to encourage self-referrals directly to Eye2Eye.
Current Website
💼
The business goals
Drive more patients to self refer to increase referral rates
Less resources allocated to phone lines
Improve customer satisfaction
️🗒️
The current solution
Only phone number visible on the website
No option to self refer via a form
No clear self-referral section on the website
User Research
How do people currently access urgent care?
To understand how people access urgent but not life threatening care, I surveyed 24 individuals and uncovered three key insights:
GP
Emergency Services
Private
📌
58% relied on emergency services
📌
29% trusted their GP for urgent care needs.
📌
Only 8% were aware of the self-referral option
User Interviews
“I feel like I’m not heard when I’m explaining my issues to my GP”
To dive deeper into user behaviour, I conducted interviews guided by three primary research goals:
⛑️
Understanding the current process
Explored users’ most recent experiences accessing urgent but non-life-threatening healthcare.
Uncovered a tendency to rely on familiar but slower routes, like GPs, even for acute eye issues.
👥
Understanding user needs
Discovered that users often feel dismissed by healthcare workers, frustrated with long wait times, and unsure if their issue warrants urgent care.
Highlighted the emotional and logistical challenges faced when trying to access appropriate care.
💼
Aligning business goals with user needs
Identified a significant gap between user expectations and current care pathways.
Users expressed a desire for clear, direct, and easily accessible solutions for urgent eye care, reinforcing the need for a streamlined self-referral system.
Competitor Analysis
Drawing motivation from traditional procedures
I conducted a review of competitors to draw inspiration and understand current industry practices in facilitating access to eye care services.
🔑 Key Takeaways
Clear and direct calls-to-action
Easy and immediate access to contact information
☑️
Newmedica
NHS branding
Referral process clearly signposted
☑️
Circle Health Group
Clear and simple call to action
Can easily locate contact information
☑️
Moorfields Eye Hospital
Clear NHS branding
Similar design to NHS government website
Affinity Mapping
Visualising the research findings
I used affinity mapping to organise insights gathered from user interviews, uncovering key themes and patterns including:
💬
Feeling dismissed
Users often feel unheard or overlooked by healthcare workers, leading to dissatisfaction and mistrust.
❌
Frustration with Inadequate Services
Users felt the care they received was insufficient to address their needs, compounding their stress and dissatisfaction.
⏱️
Dislike for Long Wait Times
Long delays in accessing care were a common frustration, especially for urgent issues.
User persona
Meet Rosie, a busy working professional
The persona was created to humanise the user experience, helping to visualise the challenges, emotions, and needs of patients seeking urgent eye care. Rosie encapsulates the research findings and allowed me to anchor the solution to meet her needs.
Quick facts
Struggles to balance work and life
Never had urgent health problem
Recently registered with a new GP
Lives with flatmate
“The wait times in between appointments was extremely frustrating watching my condition worsen”
Insights
Wants to live a healthy life and avoid painful, costly health problems
Limited personal time, so she wants urgent healthcare services to take up less of her time
Wants to feel valued and listened to when discussing her health with a professional
Reduce friction points in current healthcare processes
Increase awareness of which avenue to go to to seek appropriate help in an urgent healthcare situation
Improve communication between healthcare workers and patients
Experience Map
Mapping the Patient Journey to Identify Pain Points
👥
Through conducting a collaborative workshop with the user base, we created an experience map, capturing the journey of patients seeking urgent eye care. Together, we outlined the current user experience, highlighting the most frustrating pain points.
⭐
This process also helped identify key opportunities for improvement, such as clearer triaging, empathetic communication, and streamlined pathways to care.
Defining the problem
Consolidating the research
Research showed that patients with acute eye problems feel dismissed, face long wait times, and are often unaware of self-referral options, causing unnecessary distress. With only 8% aware of self-referral, clearer communication and streamlined access became essential. This led to the following problem statement and hypothesis.
🛠️
Problem Statement
Patients with acute eye problems often struggle to access the correct and timely urgent care, leading to unnecessary physical and mental distress.
💡
Hypothesis
By redesigning the Eye2Eye website to clearly highlight the self-referral process for acute eye problems, we can increase awareness and usage of this service. I will know this is true when we observe higher rates of self-referral and improved patient satisfaction.
Ideation
Rapid Ideation to explore solutions
To generate potential solutions quickly and efficiently, I used the Crazy 8s ideation technique. This approach allowed me to brainstorm a wide range of ideas within a short time frame, focusing on addressing the core problem of improving self-referral awareness and access.
Low-fidelity wireframes
Starting with paper to shape ideas
I began with paper wireframes to quickly visualise and contextualise my ideas in a flexible and low-fidelity format. This approach allowed me to experiment with layouts, test initial concepts, and establish a loose flow for the self-referral process before moving on to a more defined user flow and detailed designs.
User flows
Mapping the self-referral user flow
I broke down the user flow into three distinct steps, creating user flows that aligned with customers’ mental models of how they might seek help. These flows represented three scenarios:
🚨
A user with a very urgent and severe eye problem
⏳
A user with an urgent but not life-threatening issue
👁️
A user with a non-urgent eye problem
Design system
Establishing Clear and Trustworthy Medical Branding
Through competitor analysis and research into NHS branding, I developed a simple design system that embodies clarity, trust, and professionalism, ensuring alignment with user expectations for medical services.
Design system
#0060BE
#3A5B76
#C90000
Typography
Title - Inter Bold
H1 - Inter Medium
H2 - Inter Bold
Body - Inter Regular
Usability Testing
Iteration Through User Feedback
During usability testing, I identified key areas for improvement and made targeted changes to enhance the user experience:
🔤
Condensed text
Streamlined content to support quick scanning and better accessibility for users in urgent situations.
📝
Clearer copy
Simplified language to remove jargon and make the process easier to understand.
🔄️
Content reorder
Adjusted the information hierarchy to guide users directly to the contact information and self-referral form.
High fidelity designs
Optimised Designs for Desktop
These are the final, polished designs for the self-referral process on the Eye2Eye website, optimised for web accessibility and user experience.
Results
From waiting months to referral in minutes
The final designs align with Eye2Eye’s business goals by improving self-referral awareness, enhancing accessibility, and reducing reliance on GP involvement.
✅
Streamlined self-referral process
The high-fidelity designs significantly reduced the number of steps needed for users to self-refer, ensuring a faster and less frustrating experience.
✅
Improved clarity and navigation
Changes to content hierarchy and copywriting provided users with a clearer pathway to self-referral, making the process more accessible and intuitive.
✅
Increased awareness potential
The redesign prominently showcased the self-referral option, addressing the previously low awareness rate of 8% revealed during research.
Reflection & Next steps
If I had more time...
💻
Redesign the rest of the website to improve navigation and ensure a consistent user experience
📖
Add educational sections to inform customers about self-referral
📥
Improve the triaging system for greater efficiency and user satisfaction
Let’s connect! ✨
sadafwaseeq@hotmail.co.uk