Campus Health & Wellbeing
Breaking barriers to health care access on Cal Poly campus
Team
Cassia Gray, Jacob Sterrett, Katrina Lin, Shabella Oliver
Timeline
Seven weeks
Tools
Figma, FigJam
Problem
Accessing health services at Cal Poly is a time-consuming process. With an outdated appointment scheduling system primarily reliant on over-the-phone communication, many students experience long wait times in a call queue and difficulty in reaching their providers. The existing portal design is unintuitive which increases cognitive load and contributes to overall poor navigation.
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Many students are reliant on obtaining crucial basic health care from their campus centers yet at Cal Poly, our outdated system acts as a digital barrier for students to access health care.
Existing portal design.
Affinity Map
Research
Root Cause Analysis
User Research
Our team conducted a survey targeting Cal Poly students to gain valuable insights into their preferences, behaviors, and pain points. We received 36 responses.
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45.7% of students positively rate the design of the portal
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20.6% of students find it easy to navigate the Counseling and Health Services portal
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65.6% of students have experienced difficulty making an appointment
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76.5% of students would be more likely to schedule an appointment if there was an app
Genchi Genbutsu
Applying Genchi Genbutsu—the principle of "go and see for yourself"—I visited the Health Center to experience the appointment-making workflow firsthand. This helped me gain an understanding of the user journey and identify friction. We then mapped the current desktop portal flow as well as the in-person flow.
Solution
Create a mobile app that prioritizes convenience and simplicity through an organized interface. Key design considerations include:
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Minimalism — Recognizing the heavy mental load carried by college students, the app will feature a clean design and concise copy that aligns with the Cal Poly brand.
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Supportive Communication: Enhancing user engagement with easily accessible information.
Create an app that blends convenience with simplicity through an organized mobile portal interface. Design with the understanding that college students are carrying a heavy mental load. Focus on minimal design and concise copy that still aligns with the Cal Poly brand. Emphasize supportive communication and easily accessible information.
Ideate
Keeping our focus in mind I fleshed out some lo-fi and mid-fi wireframes
Iterate
The design process for this project had a two week time allocation in between the initial survey and the second round of user feedback on the final design, so I wanted to move into our hi-fi's once I had established basic structure. Version one hi-fi's were improved upon with many adjustments then finalized and expanded upon. Below is a quick example.
Final Frames
User Feedback
Our team conducted a second survey with the updated, mobile portal interface, sent out to Cal Poly students to see how the improvements were perceived. We got 50 responses and this is what people had to say about our updated health portal design:​
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83.5% of students positively rate the design of the portal
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85.1% of students find it easy to navigate the Counseling and Health Services portal
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91.5% of students would feel comfortable making an appointment with this app
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79.2% of students feel that they could communicate well with their provider through this app
People felt like the information was more accessible:
"I love the simple, concise navigation with information organized into subcategories rather than many words on a page"
"the information is easy to consume in comparison to all of the long text on the website"
"the color really helped move my eye around to different locations and functions of the app"
There are still improvements to be made, people felt like they would appreciate if we added:
"an option to see how long the wait is, or if there is availability for appointments that day"
"a segment on the prescriptions page saying how many refills the person has left"
"live chat/chatbot feature for simple questions"
Integration
There may be some difficulty in implementing the changes suggested as part of this project due to the nature of Cal Poly's institution and their legacy systems. The app might not work with Campus Health and Wellbeing's information systems, and it could require an entirely different IT support suite. The portal maintenance could potentially be more expensive. Some of the suggested changes (such as allowing appointments to be made online while still restrictive) were implemented during the course of the project.
Reflection
This project was a passion project come to life for me in a group setting and became an excellent learning experience about how to try to hedge bias on a project that strikes home for you. My freshman year of college I spent hours upon hours at the CP Health and Wellbeing Center trying to access care as I hopped from one dorm virus to the next. While I had felt like I had gone through a consistent struggle with keeping up with my providers and making appointments, there was also a person on my team who had never even been to the Health and Wellbeing Center. Balancing everyone's voices and perspectives became important in creating the most well rounded experience, my abundance of experience should never overshadow the first time user or any user at all for that matter. I realized that my stressful experience wasn't always going to be unanimous, I had to let the user data speak for itself without influencing others to feel my pain.