Health is one of the major concerns of today’s world. We are living in a fast-paced world where going to the gym every day seems a challenge. But tracking one’s health status is not that much difficult.

There are lots of mobile health applications that you can use to track your everyday health status. With countless health apps already in the market, healthcare providers’ major challenge is to develop a mobile health app that functions well, looks organized, can be sustained, and is out of the box. 

According to Zion Market Research, the global mhealth market size is expected to reach $102.43 billion by 2022. The base of smartphone users is growing tremendously. There are roughly 4.66 billion people worldwide using the internet at the start of 2021 – that’s close to 60 percent of the world’s total population. This clearly shows that the app market is not going to slow down. 

If we talk about designing a healthcare app, it is not an easy task. It needs creativity, patience, and a lot of planning and research.

Here in this write-up, we discuss the challenges that one can face while making a mobile healthcare app and what you should keep in mind before and after design. Keep reading till the end to get an insight into the mhealth design world. 

Challenges in Healthcare app design 

Creating a revolutionary health app is not an easy task. And when it comes to designing a healthcare app with proper functionality, many challenges come in the way that is essential to address. Here are some of the challenges that you might face on the way to app designing:

Explanation to patients

Clear, precise, and timely communication is essential for building the physician-patient relationship and delivering quality patient care. When you design a healthcare app, explanations to patients regarding their health issue needs to be considered primarily.

Although app-based communication cannot match the level of face-to-face communication, you should try and incorporate features that make app-based communication easy.

It will be best to include features like allowing the users to ask questions and assistance when needed.

Delivering distressing information

Healthy communication can speed up the healing process, and doctors usually try to be empathetic and convey the information with sensitivity to support the users. The same thing goes for mobile healthcare apps; it is essential to use motivation and mind refreshing messages to boost the patient mood.

Establishing credibility

Many of us prefer to visit the doctor and have face-to-face interaction when facing any health problem. This is because a real doctor is commonly considered more authoritative than a mobile app.

Users would not like to use a healthcare app that doesn’t provide them authoritative information. Thus, it is essential to provide the relevant source when you provide any health information in the application. This will help in gaining patient’s trust and enhance Patient care.

Let’s know how to design a health care app.

How to design a health care app?

If you are eager to create something for people, then your passion and zeal contribute a lot. Designing a healthcare app needs proper market research; you need to examine how other app creators do their designing.

This will provide you a brief idea about what kind of features you have to incorporate in your app design. Let’s understand what you should keep in mind before and after the design.

Before you start the design

There are two factors that you have to consider:

Do user Research

To design purposeful mobile healthcare apps, the team needs to understand users’ needs and expectations. These will help implement the best design and technical solutions to achieve the desired User Experience. User research is an essential step before starting the design sprint because it will make your process easy. 

To design purposeful mobile healthcare apps, developers need to understand the needs and expectations of the users and implement the best practices for designing healthcare apps to achieve the desired results. User research is one of the important steps before you start the design because it will make your process easy. 

This means that you need answers to these questions:

1. What are the pain points of the users?
2. What do the current apps lack?
3. Are the users satisfied with the current apps?

And more! When you have answers to these questions, you can go for the healthcare app.

Do competitors research

Before you get started on anything, you have to make sure that the things you are going to do are accurate. If you really want to create an outstanding healthcare app, then check out the other apps that provide the same services as you are planning to do. There are myriad healthcare apps through which you can get an idea.

Competitors’ research involves identifying your competitors, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, and getting an idea about their app design. Also, to know what kind of features they have incorporated to give an outstanding user experience. You can decide the price range in which you want to offer your services in the future. 

These are the basic factors you should consider before you start the design.

As you start designing

When designing a healthcare app, it is crucial to keep these five main steps in your mind. 

Pay attention to clear UX and UI

If you are unaware, you should know that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. Every day thousands of apps are created by people, but all of them are not that good. The reason is the missing UX and UI details.

Hence, it is necessary for you to incorporate new technology into the app. You need to add better UX features and attractive and comprehensible UI elements.

So as you start designing a healthcare app, pay keen attention to clear UX and UI. The motive of a healthcare app is the transformation of hospitality. In healthcare apps, a bad user experience and a clunky design could severely impact the quality of care patients receive. 

Build Clear Navigation

How one can reach you without knowing about your location, the same thing goes while designing a healthcare app. Keep your app simple and navigation straightforward to make the user experience clutter-free. Many medical apps are not user-friendly; they are packed with unorganized data. This makes navigation through all this data a challenging task for users. 

In helping users find records or locations of any clinic, designers should build functional yet straightforward and simple navigation in the healthcare apps. It will save time and make the searching process convenient. 

Make sure about Accessibility

When you are involved in designing a healthcare app, one vital part of the user experience is accessibility. Hence, it is necessary for you to check if your app will work well for people with disabilities like hearing, visual, physical, and more. For instance, your healthcare app should have voice assistance for someone who is blind and should contain fewer animations if the person has motion sickness.

A mobile app means users can access from anywhere and whenever they need it. And the crystal clear UX design makes users who may be new to the technology more eager and willing to adopt it. So without proper user accessibility, it will not land you with designed results.

Pay attention to colors

Colors can highly influence the UX of any app. Can you imagine a healthcare app with bright color? Not really. Paying attention to colors, especially when you are designing a health care app, is really important. We all know that the medical industry is expressed better with cold tones that are calming and soothing and don’t pull too much attention or irritate patients.

Use color in your app, which helps people in their healing. You can make use of blue, grey, white, pink, and green. These colors possess meaning in themselves and offer an eye-soothing and healing experience to users. For background, the most common color is white. If you are adding fitness aspects in the app, you can go for dark colors like navy.

Make sure about UX writing

UX design has a direct correlation with user adoption. UX writing distinguishes any health care app from the other apps. In the designing process, make sure about UX writing as it helps users to understand the information easily and conveniently. UX writing is closely related to the microcopy, which is a short text message you find in digital products’ interfaces. UX writing is all about using simple words to explain things to the users of the app. 

UX writing in health care apps ensures a smooth, friction-free user journey in services that you are thinking of offering through your app.

With the help of these 5 points, you can come up with an outstanding healthcare app.

Do usability testing

The mobile market is vast and growing at a breakneck pace; if you are ready with a healthcare app, then the last step that comes into the light is usability testing. Before you think about what you will test and how you need to make a plan, this will serve as the actual test’s blueprint.

You can make a plan like this:

• Purpose and goals of the test
• Method ( test design )
• Tasklist
• Test environment, equipment, and logistics
• Test facilitator role
• Data to be collected and evaluation measures
• Report content and presentation

Perform a usability test on the audience close to the target audience and gather outcomes. These will help you build and improve your app. You can segment the audience based on age, gender, location, etc.

Final Verdict

If you are reading this paragraph, you have gone through all the points mentioned above in the article. These are some of the best tips and facts you can keep in mind to create an outstanding healthcare app design. Good luck!!

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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash