Salú, an app to help Venezuelans find medicines and care.
Scope
The extreme shortage of medicine and medical supplies in Venezuela has forced many people to seek alternative ways in the hopes of getting the medical care that they need. With the government’s continued lack of aid and action, Venezuela’s health crisis shows no signs of disappearing.
Finding medicines in Venezuela is an arduous chore due to the healthcare industry’s shortages and lack of technology and resources. After interviewing Venezuelans my goal was to create an app that would help facilitate the challenging task of looking for medicines and care in the country.
My Role
UX/UI designer
Timeline
80 hours
Research
The Rise of Telemedicine
In Venezuela, the adoption of telemedicine has accelerated due to the pandemic. Patients have adapted to the digital platforms to follow the health measures of social estrangement and other current social circumstances that the country faces, making telemedicine a perfect choice for medical care. However, the continuing growth of Telemedicine services will depend on the population’s access to technology.
Having learned that telemedicine is not a far-fetched idea for a country that has been in an ongoing crisis since 2007, I was determined to get to know the many different ways Venezuelans manage to get the medical care they need. This helped me better understand the pain points and frustrations they currently face.
Understanding the problem - User Interviews
First, I spoke with some people about their experiences looking for medicines, pharmacies, and care. I sought out individuals living in Venezuela and from different social backgrounds to conduct my interviews.
After speaking with the interviewees, they consistently faced two significant problems: stock information on the medicines they were looking for, and ease of pharmacy and medicine search.
Each person had a unique strategy for finding drugs and pharmacies. These ranged from word-of-mouth, personally going to several different pharmacies in one day or "pharmaceutical pilgrimage," as locals call it, to listening to morning radio programs about the announcers answering calls and acting as intermediaries between those who seek and those who donate medicines.
And when it came to finding care, outdated and time-consuming methods like the yellow pages, personally calling doctor’s offices, and word of mouth were the most common.
No matter how creative their solutions got, none were free of struggles and obstacles.
Main struggles Venezuelans are facing
They're ALL going through it
Apart from the lack of digital platforms and stock information issues that people face when looking for drugs, another common problem among participants arose regarding lines and waiting times in the pharmacies they go to. Due to shortages, power outages, and the overall crisis that affects the country, sometimes lines can be as long as 5 to 8 hours. (These lines usually form when essential products/medicines are scarce) and there is no way of knowing ahead of time, which leads to people having to plan their day around a pharmacy run.
After conducting the user interviews I learned that the difficulty of looking for medicines and care is the same for almost all Venezuelans. As a result, it was easy to visualize a single person and their challenges. Next, I created a user persona that captured the essence of my target users.
Meet Patricia!
Ideation
Brainstorming and Exploring Solutions
I thought about the way people typically search for medicines in Venezuela - they generally take a big chunk of their time in one day to personally go to the pharmacies that usually have stock of the drug they need.
If it’s their first time shopping for a new drug, someone would think: “I’m going to two different pharmacies today to see if they have the medicine and compare the prices between them, then I can choose the one,” and so on. I decided to make the searching process reflect that.
I wanted the app's core feature to be finding medicines/care. It was important to me to show that clearly.
UserFlows
I spent a while deciding on the best way forward for the searching flow. At first, I leaned more towards allowing users to select a specific pharmacy and see if the drug they were looking for was available. Later on, I changed my mind, as I decided that it was more important for users to find the medicine regardless of the pharmacy while also comparing prices.
For example, if a user selected a pharmacy but the medicine they were looking for wasn’t available, they would have to go a step back in the process to look into another pharmacy, something I thought was very important to avoid.
Sketches and Wireframes
My next step was to identify which other aspects of medical care I should include in the app. I thought it was important not to appeal to drug and pharmacy search only but rather cover different areas of care that came up in my research. Based on that I decided to create a prescription management feature, a community section where people can support each other with medicines donations or other healthcare-related issues and a medical care section as well.
Then, using the structure of the user flows, I sketched and designed the first wireframes of the app.
Design
Designing a Seamless Experience
Prescriptions Screen
The prescriptions screen was a concept that I thought was important to touch on. Mainly because prescriptions work differently, to fill a prescription in Venezuela, patients must get a paper prescription that has to be written and signed by the doctor prescribing it; therefore, every time patients have to refill their prescription, they must return to the doctor’s office to get a new one.
Since there is no system for sending your prescription to the pharmacy through a computer linked to the provider's electronic medical record, I thought that by having a print button in the app, doctors could send the prescriptions to the patients through it; that way, they could print it in the comfort of their home.
It was important for me to find a way to cut out that extra step of going back to the doctor every time a refill is needed because driving or getting to the doctor’s office can present a challenge to a person living in Venezuela, some of the reasons being the gas shortage and power outages that make public transportation like the subway unaccessible.
Product Screen
When designing the product screen I kept in mind all the important information Venezuelans want to know before buying a medicine.
Photos of the product, detailed descriptions, waiting times and suggested/similar products were the most requested.
Brand & Visuals
I named the app Salú as a reference to the Spanish word “Salud,” which means health. The reason behind naming it Salú and taking the letter “d” off the word is because not pronouncing the last letter of some words is one of the most characteristic features of Venezuelan/Caribbean Spanish. I wanted to create a sense of belonging and identity in our culture by making the name more folkloric.
When it was time to choose the colors I decided to go with a calming feeling, as users were likely to be using the app when feeling stressed or tired. I chose a soft blend between an intense blue and a light purple color to convey serenity and reliability. I also added a bright green and yellow to express a sense of freshness and modernity without completely stirring away from the colors usually associated with healthcare.
Validation
User Testing
Once I had all the screens, I created a high fidelity prototype in Figma to test two different user flows. One of them prompted an existing user to open the app and search for a medicine to pick up in-store and the second flow had the user make an appointment with an optometrist.
Making an Appointment
Iteration + Next Steps
First impressions of the app were described as friendly, easy to use, appealing and helpful. Some participants brought light to some accessibility issues in the original design like some buttons being hard to recognize due to their light color, main CTA’s were also revised because there was not enough contrast, and it was uncomfortable to read for some.
All participants completed the tasks successfully, and the overall concept of telehealth proved to be something people living in Venezuela want to use more often and are open to.
Homepage Adjustments
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The illustration in the search section was removed to avoid visual clutter and distraction from the actual function.
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The “Haz tu Cita” button did not have enough contrast, so it was made a darker shade of green.
Final Thoughts
Creating this project in Spanish was one of the biggest challenges. The main two reasons being:
1. All of my UX projects and knowledge I’ve created and learned in English and somewhat focused on the “American market” and
2. Having to keep in mind that different languages require different amounts of space in design. For example, translating from English Into Spanish can result in a 20-25% expansion. So I had to assume the text could either grow or shrink.
However, this is when my background in localization proved to be valuable because aside from translation being one of the most essential tasks, another aspect of the process was thinking about how that experience relates to a particular culture, things that just feel familiar, I was no longer designing for the American culture and lifestyle.
This project was a bit challenging in some areas, one of them being the time constraints that held me from further iterating, but it was also very fun and insightful. It was also interesting to see how it was the findings from research that molded the app.