Innovative medical app that provides real-time access medical services: Doc.ua Case Study
- Swift
- Kotlin
- Firebase
- Xcode
- Jenkins
doc.ua BY THE NUMBERS
Doc.ua is convenient online medicine, a service that simplifies access to all medical services in real time.
About the client & the story behind them
As healthcare globally shifts towards digitization, embracing electronic records, online appointments, and telemedicine, Doc.ua leads this transformation in Ukraine. As the nation’s foremost online service for medical bookings, it enables effortless access to a wide range of healthcare services, eliminating the need for queues.
Recognizing that healthcare extends beyond mere appointments, Doc.ua aspired to create a comprehensive ecosystem that enhances patient-doctor interactions and ensures thorough health care and data management. In alignment with the digital evolution, Doc.ua sought to broaden its reach and enrich user experiences by venturing into mobile applications, partnering with us to bring this vision to life.
Request to Devlight
Doc.ua approached us with a visionary project: to launch Ukraine’s first extensive online hub for mobile devices, aiming to captivate a broader user base. Initially, our mission was to create an MVP application designed for doctors, enabling them to effortlessly prescribe tests, diagnoses, and treatments, all while receiving deserved compensation.
This initial step marked the beginning of our journey towards developing a comprehensive application for patients. This forthcoming app would not only mirror the web version’s functionalities but also introduce exclusive features tailored for mobile use, promising an enriched user experience.
Challenges and Limitation
Launching a comprehensive online mobile hub within an ambitious six-month timeline presented a significant challenge. Given the hub’s extensive functionality, we strategized to phase the development, prioritizing key features for early iterations to ensure a swift and impactful launch.
Furthermore, seamlessly integrating a module to direct users from Google searches straight to the app’s specific services required innovative solutions. The transition from the website’s transliterated services to the app’s operational pages necessitated the development of a repeater, bridging the gap between search engines and the app’s nuanced functionality.
How we did it — solutions, approach, methodology
Our journey in crafting Doc.ua’s mobile applications was a meticulously planned endeavor, initiated with a 3-day design sprint, anchored by a deep commitment to empathy, focus, and user-centered design.
Understanding and Empathy
We kicked off with a deep dive into understanding the multifaceted needs of our users and the healthcare ecosystem. By engaging in blitz reports, we gained a comprehensive view of business objectives, technological capabilities, and user expectations. Stakeholder mapping and competitor analysis further enriched our understanding, setting a solid foundation for innovation.
Focus and Ideation
With insights from day one, we honed in on pivotal ideas that promised the most impact. Defining design principles became our roadmap, guiding us through the maze of possibilities to a clear strategy for development. This stage was crucial for outlining customer journeys that would later shape the apps’ functionality and user experience.
Design and Visualization
The culmination of our sprint, this day was dedicated to bringing our vision to life through detailed storyboards and interface sketches. This collaborative effort resulted in the identification of five key audience subgroups, optimizing our approach for targeted user engagement and ensuring the design’s alignment with real-world needs.
Design Sprint Results & Insights
Our sprint yielded invaluable insights, confirmed by consultations with medical experts. We identified critical challenges that could be effectively addressed by the synergy of two mobile applications, namely:
- Providing comprehensive patient information to doctors for informed care.
- Assisting patients in identifying the right specialists for their needs.
- Enhancing service accessibility through integration with insurance companies.
- Creating a platform that not only connects patients with doctors but also facilitates the financial aspect of healthcare services.
These insights shaped our development journey, leading to the creation of a dual-application ecosystem that redefines healthcare accessibility and convenience for both doctors and patients in Ukraine
Gathering and Forming the Requirements
Post-Design Sprint, we transitioned to the critical phase of gathering and defining the project’s backbone. This involved meticulously developing a product backlog, crafting detailed user stories, and outlining a BPMN process map and technical requirements. This stage laid the groundwork for translating our vision into actionable steps, ensuring a clear path forward for development.
Creating of Low-Fidelity-Prototype and API Documentation
Building on our detailed requirements, we embarked on crafting a black-and-white prototype, a crucial step that provided a visual and functional blueprint of our envisioned application. Following this, we delved into the technicalities, preparing comprehensive API documentation to guide the development process.
Utilizing Postman, we meticulously cataloged a list of requests along with illustrative examples, setting the stage for seamless implementation and integration.
Design Stage
In the design phase, our goal was to enrich the project’s visual and functional appeal. Starting with our initial black-and-white prototype, we layered in color, imagery, and a dynamic user interface aligned with the client’s brand identity. We meticulously integrated key brand elements—logos, color schemes, and typography—drawing from the client’s brand guidelines to ensure the application felt like a natural extension of their brand ecosystem.
A significant focus was the development of a comprehensive UI concept and Design System. These components structured the application’s visual and interactive elements, ensuring consistency and a seamless user experience. Our detailed UI Kit and Style Guide were instrumental in maintaining a unified design language across the app, catering to both the client’s functional requirements and their aesthetic values.
Ultimately, the design phase transformed our conceptual vision into a vibrant and user-friendly application, perfectly aligned with the client’s brand and user expectations.
Product Development
Following design approval, we transitioned into the development phase, a pivotal shift from planning to building the application. Our team, comprising expert developers and engineers, selected an optimal technology stack tailored to the project’s needs, ensuring the chosen platforms, languages, and frameworks would perfectly support our goals. This phase was characterized by meticulously converting design blueprints into functional code, with every feature meticulously crafted to meet the project’s objectives.
Product Testing Stage
Testing was integral to our development process, employing iterative regression testing to ensure each update didn’t reintroduce previous issues. This approach, crucial for maintaining product integrity, helped us preempt extensive debugging.
Comprehensive test documentation captured our strategy, metrics, and outcomes, enabling continuous refinement of project requirements and testing scope. Additionally, we conducted thorough security testing, simulating potential attacks to identify vulnerabilities through a blend of static and dynamic analyses and penetration testing.
Before launch, we also engaged real users in testing to identify any remaining issues, ensuring the application met our standards for public release. This final testing phase was pivotal in ensuring the application’s readiness for market entry.
Product Release and Growth
The product release marked not just the unveiling of new features but a commitment to delivering enhanced value to our clients. This significant milestone was achieved through the collective efforts of our teams, ensuring a smooth transition to market and comprehensive support for user interactions.
Following the launch, we shifted focus towards the growth phase, analyzing data and marketing effectiveness to evaluate our performance. Our goal was to understand user reception through direct feedback and customer service interactions, which provided invaluable insights into user needs and potential improvements.
In the fast-evolving mobile app market, continuous development and adaptation are key. Thus, our launch represents just the beginning of our journey, with ongoing enhancements planned to keep pace with industry trends and user expectations, aiming for sustained growth and success.
Completed challenges
We successfully launched on schedule, fulfilling our commitment to deliver an exceptional product. Our initial release featured a dedicated app for doctors, streamlining the process of receiving and managing assistance requests.
Subsequently, we expanded our ecosystem with a patient application, enhancing the healthcare experience with features like doctor search, filtering, booking, and reviews.
Just six months post-MVP, in June 2020, we introduced a lab functionality, catering not just to doctors but also to patients booking tests. Additionally, we rolled out an e-commerce feature, enabling users to purchase medications directly through the app, complemented by reservation, purchase, and delivery options, including courier services, with seamless integration for payments.
KEY FEATURES AND VALUE
Final design
Here are some of the final design screens that we want to share with you.
Customer feedback
Devlight has developed quite high-load projects and this was one of the key points – for us to find the partner who knows how to build a high-load application architecture. Also, one of the benefits of Devlight is the cool design sprint approach for quick entry and understanding of business processes and synchronization of actions of the customer’s team and internal team before starting work
