Nye Health

Nye is working to update the way people engage with healthcare. From tracking medications to recording long-term trends in symptoms, they’re re-examining the whole experience.

Nye has created a unique patient engagement and real-world data platform: a powerful, compliant bridge between patients, their data, healthcare providers and the life sciences industry. Fluent was brought in to help develop a prototype of how users might engage with that platform, along with a design system to keep future growth consistent.

Now, Nye can demonstrate the power of their platform’s capabilities in a user-friendly patient interface. Their extensive knowledge and expertise have been captured in a tangible, clinically viable proof of concept.

Discovery: Working with a strong tech legacy

Our discovery phase was aided considerably by Nye’s comprehensive market and user research. There was extensive documentation for us to dive into, letting us grasp the project even quicker than usual.

There were also pre-existing technical considerations to pick up. Nye already had the capability to integrate with NHS electronic health records. That was a defining advantage at this early product stage. Whatever technologies we used would need to maintain that integration.

Streamlining data access and permissions would clearly be a key element of the project, but there were also security considerations. Data had to be stored within particular jurisdictions and couldn’t be moved. That impacted the project’s architecture; some cloud services were ruled out, for example.

To begin with, we opted for the most straightforward solution which would leave the most room for scaling. A lot of focus was on low-friction ways for patients to give informed consent about access to their medical data.

A product design definition sprint gave us a series of concepts, potential capabilities for the finished app. Not long afterwards, after further reflection on what newer customers needed, came the design and development phase.

Designing for information triaging, evolving efficiencies

A typical user journey might potentially take someone through hundreds of questions, from a database of over 1,700. How could we help people pass from the start to the end points with as little friction as possible?

Things got more complex in that there were multiple possible formats for both capturing and reporting data. Some questions could be answered quantitatively. Others called for fuzzier degrees of truth, while others could only be addressed qualitatively by written answers. All these datasets had to work together.

It was decided that questions would be broken up into sessions. Users’ answers to the first session would dictate the questions they saw in the next, and so on. Say early questions indicated the possibility of a condition like social anxiety, for instance, future questions would be tailored to zoom in on anxiety, providing the highest-resolution picture of a person’s mental health possible.

How these questions would be grouped formed the bulk of the UX work. But there were also shortcuts and improvements we could suggest to help people move through the process faster. A single-keypress answer feature is only one example, albeit a really helpful one for users. The balance was to streamline the assessment, while making sure each question retained the user’s full attention and focus.