Amazon Care

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YEAR
2017 –2019
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ROLE
Lead app designer

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Healthcare built around you

Amazon Care is a service provided to those who need medical support for themselves and the ones they love. It aims to be one of the world's most trusted customer–centric care services.

MY ROLE

Design the experience for those who need care

I joined the Amazon Care team as a founding member of the product. My main responsibilities were to design the best possible care experiences for our customers, specifically those who need urgent care. I strived to bring the best possible care experience to our customers. I worked closely with our health care providers, researchers, web designers, mobile developers, and back-end developers to solve the problems that our customers are experiencing in the current healthcare system. 

PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

Change the way people get treatment

In real life, there are many steps before seeing a doctor in person. Amazon Care is to change the way people see a doctor and how they get treated. We strived hard to meet one of Amazon’s principles – Customer obsession.

What is the problem we are solving?

Instantaneous access to medical care currently does not exist. For most people, the first step to receive medical care is to see a Family or a Primary Care Physician (PCP). In the US, the average wait time to see a family doctor is 19 days (23 days in Seattle). As a result, new models of healthcare delivery in the physical (urgent care centers, retail clinics), and the digital (telemedicine) worlds have emerged. Visiting a physical clinic is still far from immediate.

What is our solution?

We strive to build a system that improves the access time by >10X and the coverage of conditions by >16X compared to the best available fastest offerings, to make instantly accessible comprehensive medical care possible.

Experience principles

To meet our experience bar over the course of the project, we set experience principles. These principles guided us to be on track all the time and reminded us to be the most customer-centric medical service provider.

CHALLENGE 1

Gathering patient info

Patients need to do many things before seeing a doctor in person. Even if they see a doctor, they don’t usually feel cared for. I worked with medical providers to identify the problems and discussed how we could help customers to have an optimal visiting experience.

Initial discussion

The team gathered together to discuss the flow of the video care visit experience. Medical providers wanted to know more about patients before seeing them following typical hospital visits and other telemedicine apps flow. I shared different opinions. 

• What are we trying to solve? What do we need to do for patients?
• What makes Amazon Care different from other telemedicine service apps?
• Do they have to answer these questions every time they visit?
• Do medical providers re-confirm those answers?
• Will customers understand these terms?

Suggestion

After rounds of discussion, we still couldn't land on the decision. So I created a quick flow animation to communicate the idea and shared it with the team to discuss the patient-focused experience. It required more work on our sides but aligned with the vision of the product. For this suggested flow, I added an idea - the human touch. When the waiting time takes longer than expected, nurses send a message about the reason for delaying.

The final design

We could finally make a streamlined pre-visit experience after we aligned on the true patient-care experiences – only taking absolutely required steps like selecting a patient and checking consent.

Exploring waiting time experience

One thing that I wanted to improve was to make the 60s waiting time to help patients feel relaxed. I explored different ideas to improve the waiting time experience. In the end, we decided not to add anything during the waiting time but to enable a front camera so that patients could check themselves up before seeing a medical provider.

CHALLENGE 2

Keep conversation going

During the video care with a clinician, patients and the clinician might encounter unexpected or unavoidable connection issues like losing the connection or video quality that could impact conversation between them. I worked with the developers to discuss the problems and how we can handle video quality issues. Also, what we can provide to patients to recover from the situation.

Approach

We tested lots of video call quality to find the boundary where patients can still have conversations with clinicians.

• Bad network option 1: App informs patients about the situation
• Bad network option 2: Automatically degrade the video quality
• Lost connection: Clinicians call patients to continue the care

High packet loss testing

Low kBPS

Network indicator

Decision

We decided to go with option 2 (Automatically degrade the video quality) after receiving feedback from a director and a VP.

• Degrade video quality if the network is unstable
• Turn off the video if the situation goes bad, but keep the audio to continue the conversation
• Clinicians confirm patients' phone numbers beginning of the conversation and explain the case if they may need to call

CHALLENGE 3

Designing chat care

Customers can chat with a clinician to ask for general health questions and any medical advice. These days, chat is one of the main communication tools. Some might find it difficult to speak with a clinician in person. Chat is more convenient and accessible to customers who need a quick solution or are more accustomed to text messages.

Sync, not async

Due to several technical and resource constraints, we decided to go with a synchronous chat experience that requires another connection treatment like the video care.

Details

Details make the chat experience more covenient

Conclusion

Listen from our customers

Every week, we invited selected Amazon employees for user testing to validate the flow and find the pain points that customers might encounter through the care services. We received abundant valuable feedback from them and helped us to even more simplifying the experience.

Onboarding concept tested

This is one of the onboarding concepts that we tested. We tried different ways to onboard people because there were many required steps to be completed during onboarding, such as filling in basic information

Final words

It was a long and hard journey to finish this project. Health care is a very new topic for me. I had to do a vast amount of conversations with clinicians to understand the existing health care system and their own pain points. Also, did a vast amount of competitive analysis of existing telemedicine apps and the best app that provides good service to customers.

I was happy about the result because the Amazon Care app brings truly customer-obsessed experiences. To reach our goal, every team member in the Amazon Care team strived really hard to accomplish the best possible customer experiences.

Reviews from users

"This app is very easy to use and the call quality is fantastic. I'm very happy this is available."

"I was connected to a nurse within 30 seconds and she answered all my questions and sent me a care plan. All free. 100% recommended."

"I have to say this is the most helpful app I have ever use. Saved a tons of time and pain for me since the delivery is fast and I don't have to go out to see a doctor. I really like it"

I typically avoid doctors, but not because I'm scared of them, because I'm scared of spending 45 minutes in a waiting room and five minutes with an actual care provider. This inverts the whole process where waiting is practically *none*, and the doctors really take time to talk to you. I'm a total convert.

"The interface was seamless. The nurse practitioner was knowledgeable and ask probing questions to understand my situation even though it seems straightforward from the get-go. Much better than waiting in line or driving to a care facility!"

"Beyond amazing, going to revolutionize Health care industry."

If you want to know more about this project, you can visit the Amazon Care website or contact me for more info.