Svaas
Healthcare | Technology | Design
Svaas is an initiative by Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories (a multinational pharmaceutical company). Svaas is a digitally-enabled, integrated Outpatient Care offering, to bring to its users an extremely simple-to-use yet futuristic multi-service and cashless digital platform for individuals and corporate employees.
My Role
Product design from research to conceptualization, and visualization of the Svaas OPD app
Overview
About the Project
Background
In India, we lack a unified insurance-based healthcare system. Svaas brings together access to doctors, diagnostic services, pharmacies and insurance—in short, the entire outpatient life-cycle—onto one digital platform. Svaas meets a genuine unmet need for a convenient cashless digital outpatient experience.
Brief
The aim was to unite healthcare services like medical practitioners, clinics, pharmacy stores, diagnostic laboratories, etc. on one platform paid by insurance to ensure quick, affordable, safe and consistent care.
A. To create a module that caters to doctor consultation, medicine purchase, and lab diagnostics. It is envisaged to provide end-to-end healthcare solutions. Referred to as the Svaas OPD module.
B. To create a Health Track module where the end-user will be able to track fitness activities and monitor vitals. Referred to as the Svaas Health Track module.
Project Overview
Cashless experience
Cashless experience would be the key differentiator
Scalable Approach
Easy to maintain and create new features
Design System
Well organized UI kit with guidelines and rules
Visual design
A premium yet friendly look and feel in terms of visual design
Android and iOS platforms
The app will be designed for iOS first and later adapted for Android.
We set out with the aim to unify the currently disjointed journeys into one platform to offer end-to-end healthcare and wellness. It was both challenging as well as exciting to define and design a pioneer app in the med-tech domain in India.
Prospective Impact
Market leaders in cashless healthcare domain
Easy to avail insurance with negligible paperwork
Quick, safe, affordable and consistent care
A hassle-free and unified insurance-based healthcare system
Reliable platform for doctors to reach people in need
One-stop solution for all healthcare and wellness needs
Enhance discoverability of trustworthy healthcare practicioners
Design Process
The Strategy
We adhered to 6 step design process to make the design more efficient and user friendly.
To best document the research and understanding phase of this project, I have divided the process into major factors that influenced the outcome.
A. Business: Understanding the intent and problem statement of the project
B. User: Understanding the users, their needs and aspirations
C. Technology: Taking into consideration the technical requirements and capabilities of the project
Understanding: The Business & The Technology
IPD OPD
In India, health insurance coverage for IPD is growing. But for OPD, it is almost non-existent. This is the primary charter for growth.
The Business
Sick-care Healthcare
Svaas intends to build a network of doctors and healthcare practitioners. And the goal of the app is to minimize insurance fraud.
B2C B2B
Primarily, Svaas will be available through corporations to their employees.
Hybrid Application
Catering to both iOS and Android users.
The Technology
Re-usability
A modular approach would ensure easy migration.
The Frontend
React Native lets you create an application for various platforms while using the same codebase.
PWA Constraints
It is found that PWA apps tend to lag while the system runs the code in the background.
PWA is a one-time development platform, it would be useful for admin panel or doctor’s terminal.
Understanding The Users
Primary personas mainly consist of corporate employees and their families/dependants
Acute Patient
Saket and his family members have availed family health insurance. Saket avails the benefits whenever any member of the family feels unwell or requires treatment. The difficulty he faces is the availability of their Family Doctor for a hassle-free consultation and an immediate treatment.
Chronic Condition Patient
Mira’s son, Jai is the primary holder of health insurance. She struggles with diabetes and needs to do monthly check-ups. Jai manages all her healthcare needs and his major pain-point while booking an appointment is availing insurance smoothly. Medical terminology adds to his difficulty while availing insurance. He would prefer simple language and guided journeys.
Healthy Life Seeker
Anish is young and lives alone. He aspires to stay healthy through his insurance benefits. Other fitness apps that he has tried, has offered him a too many suggestions to do so. He is looking for more personalised recommendations.
Supporting personas would play a secondary role to enable primary personas to achieve their goals.
*Note: The supporting personas were not in scope for the OPD Consumer App.
Health Coach
Family Doctor
Corporate Admin
Secondary Research
The platform has a strong visual language, which is depicted throught iconography and illustrations.
Good copy-writing has enabled clear communication.
Minimalist and contemporary looks are inviting and enable ease of use.
Error prevention during input has been catered to.
The app gives user control and freedom.
Personalized suggestions enable quick responses from the user.
With too much information, the users would tend to miss out on important information.
Effective visualizations through the platform
Kenko provides services such as EMI cards for surgeries, diagnostics, checkups, etc.
A friendly and playful user interface helps build trust
An intuitive self-assess process gives users recommendations, accelerating the process
The app describes specialist doctors along with information about symptoms and when to consult.
Insights
Looking at the Bigger Picture
The app needs to be relevant and usable for users even without an insurance, they need a one-stop solution for all their health and OPD requirements.
Through Svaas, DRL’s curated network of doctors and health practitioners can reach the users more effectively.
If the user is nudged to share some basic health conditions during onboarding, the app would become more intuitive and provide personalised recommendations.
Market Leaders
Since Svaas is partnering with insurance companies to offer OPD benefits as well, they are fore-runners in this domain in India. We intend to showcase this through the app experience.
The Cashless Experience
The app can ensure a seamless journey for all the corporate users by providing a completely cashless experience.
Visual Language
The visual language of this app would follow the premiumness of its parent company, DRL.
We also intend to build trust and loyalty through friendly and soft visual language.
Market Trends
In India, Insurance-Tech companies and cashless experiences are on the rise. We intend the app’s design and experience to be the key differentiator.
Design
Homepage
Homepage and navigation menu are very crucial elements of any app, hence this was our entry point into visual design. Building upon the components suggested by the client, we were able to deliver a well structured and easy to navigate homepage.
Design Library
Simultaneously, we also started building a design library to help us maintain consistency through the visual design of screens.
Workflow
After going through all the data collected during meetings with the client and through the secondary research, I started building workflows for the various user journeys. After several iterations of the workflows, I was able to create the most efficient workflows for the journeys.
Given here is the workflow that I designed for the Doctor Consultation Module.
The main aim of the Doctor Consultation journey was to reduce the number of steps required to book an appointment. I achieved this by integrating some important features as listed below.
Doctor Consultation Journey
Key features of this journey:
Family Doctor module - each user and their dependants would be assigned a family doctor for hassle-free and quick consultation
Online and In-clinic consultation - the user can opt between online and in-clinic consultation based on their requirements and convenience
Other features of this journey:
Sorting by Language preference
Earliest available consultation slots
Easy connect to Care Buddy
Insurance forward payment option
Book for self or dependant
Pre-consult questionnaire for quick resolution
Diagnostics are a crucial step for doctors to correctly diagnose any health condition and then prescribe the most appropriate treatment. And lab tests usually take some time to deliver the results. Hence, I thought that this journey should be easy and intuitive for the users.
Key features of this journey:
Lab visit and Home sample collection - users can give their test sample either by visiting the lab or via home sample collection by a phlebotomist based on their health condition and convenience
Diagnostic Lab Journey
Order Medicine Journey
During the COVID pandemic, home delivery of essential goods became significantly more; delivery of medicines among them. Building on this need, Svaas wanted to offer its users a more safe, convenient and trustworthy way to buy medicines.
Key features of this journey:
Home delivery and store pickup - users can check the availability of medicines in stores near them for store pick up or home delivery
My Learnings
This project has been a challenging yet rewarding journey. I actively participated in every discussion and decision, gaining extensive hands-on experience through development and testing.
Throughout the project, I observed how design thinking can inspire businesses to evolve their goals and aspirations positively.
Time management is essential in any project, and I learned the importance of time boxing to meet deadlines.
I had the opportunity to lead several project stages, such as translating user stories into workflows and creating visual design iterations.
One of my biggest learnings was the meticulous organization of deliverables and constant knowledge transfer, essential due to frequent changes in the design team.
A significant challenge was maintaining an up-to-date design system while concurrently designing screens. Despite time constraints, we adhered to this method to ensure consistency.
