Key: [stakeholder group], [problem], [negative impact], [positive outcome or benefit], [reason/impact]

I analyzed 11 total competitors, a mix of direct and indirect. While some companies solve parts of the problem, none fully address it.

View Detailed Competitive Analysis

Direct Competitors - Patient-Facing Portals & Aggregators

• Companies: Epic MyChart, OneRecord, PatientMpower, CareSpace

• Strength: Provide patients direct access to their medical records and test results in one place.

• Weakness: Limited to single-system data (MyChart) or basic aggregation without caregiver/multi-profile support (OneRecord, PatientMpower).

Indirect Competitors - Condition-Specific or Practice Management

• Companies: Tempus Olivia, DRChrono/OnPatient, Azumio (Argus, Sleep Time)

• Strength: Highly tailored to niche use cases (oncology, fitness tracking, or practice efficiency).

• Weakness: Not designed for managing multiple systems or giving a full-picture medical history for complex patients/caregivers.

I started to really hone in on who I was solving a problem for. My target audience will be adults (18–45) living with one or more chronic illnesses or managing other people's medical data (such as a parent), who see multiple doctors across different medical systems.

These users often struggle with keeping track of medical data and scheduling information, information overload, scheduling conflicts, remembering login information, and feeling unheard in appointments.

This product will help them:

• Save time

• Feel more prepared and in control

• Communicate more effectively with providers

• Maintain more accurate, comprehensive records

For my first persona, I have Maya, a 22-year-old college student diagnosed with Lupus three years ago. She sees four specialists across three hospital systems and spends hours checking for updates and preparing for visits. Maya is overwhelmed and wants to bring everything together and take control of her health.

View additional details for my chronic illness patient persona (Includes: 5 W’s Analysis, Connect Persona to Problem, Day-in-the-Life, ABT User Narrative, and Supporting Evidence).

When asked what tools people used to help manage their health information, there were multiple tools mentioned in addition to the patient portals, like physical binders, virtual notes, and symptom tracking apps. Patients were building their own multi-tool systems to stay afloat. And my research showed it’s not because they want to, it’s because no single tool works well enough.

In total, I got responses from 51 people (46 chronic illness patients, 1 parent, and 4 physicians).

The screener survey for chronic illness patients had some great insights and left me with a variety of potential interview participants. After analyzing the responses, I ended up selecting a total of 9 people to conduct my user interviews with:

1. 4 chronic illness patients who were managing 3+ medical portals

2. 1 parent caring for 2 children with health conditions

3. 4 physicians with 5+ years of experience. Each interview was designed to uncover specific pain points and opportunities

Each interview was designed to uncover specific pain points and opportunities.

Chronic Illness Patients (Script):

• How do they feel about the way health information is shared and organized?

• Have they had any negative health outcomes or experiences as a result of your medical data being across multiple systems?

• How do they manage their medical data across multiple systems?

• Are there any specific workarounds they have developed that really help them manage the fragmented data?

Parents (Script):

• How are they managing multiple children’s portals?

• How do they track appointments, test results, and communication with physicians?

Physicians (Script):

• How and where do they receive patient data?

• What patient medical information do they rely on most?

• What is the impact of missing/incomplete data on care?

Cross-Group Insights

• Unifying Theme: Data fragmentation impacts everyone, patients, caregivers, and providers, leading to wasted time, missed information, and frustration.

View Full Analysis

I started considering my design opportunities by listing every idea I picked up while talking to each user group. There ended up being a lot of opportunities to choose from:

Ultimately, I landed on some primary solutions.

For patients with chronic illnesses, they need a unified dashboard—a single place where patients can view everything and share it with their doctors. This would reduce stress and give patients a stronger sense of control over their healthcare journey.

Parents/caregivers need a family view, where they can easily switch between profiles, see all appointments in a shared calendar, and quickly go through new notifications to give them confidence that nothing critical is being missed.

Physicians told me that they need to see a scannable view of a patient’s medications, test results, and prior visit notes. This is another reason why a health summary packet is such a powerful opportunity. It can save providers time and help them deliver better care while also reducing the burden on patients.

Final Design Opportunities:

• Centralized dashboard for patients and caregivers to manage multiple portals.

• Family-oriented features (profile switching, shared calendar, alerts).

• Exportable, structured health summaries for physicians that reduce duplication and delays.

Today, the biggest pain point is when patients are logging into 3-5 different patient portals, gathering relevant medical data for their appointment. This can take hours and lots of frustration navigating poorly built portals and remembering various passwords.

In the future state, showing my proposed design solution, patients can go to one place to gather all the medical data they need and easily share it with their physician.

This is a huge improvement in their journey. Now, instead of spending hours combing through multiple portals, they can access all the data quickly in one place.

In the second set of journey maps, I look at the perspective of a parent preparing for her two children's appointments.

Similar to patients, parents main pain point was the time between appointments. They start gathering the relevant data which means logging into multiple systems. It takes a lot of time and energy. And for a parent with two children, they have to do the same thing for their second child. So double the portals, double the medical data, and double the time.

In the future state, everything is centralized. Our parent can easily access all the data in one place and even see a helpful family calendar view and notification center.

The second user flow examines the process of creating a health summary packet users can share:

Starting my migration into the design phase, I began by putting together a mood board and some branding concepts.

Visually, I was interested in something clean and simple, but also wanted to thoughtfully utilize color for things like color coding. I knew I’d have elements of calendars and data tables, so I took some time to look into different design styles for those.

For my brand, I wanted to portray a trustworthy platform where someone could go to get accurate information. I also ended up creating a new word for my site’s name: Elaris (eh-lar-us).

From here, I began to work on my basic design system. Identifying the colors, typography, and iconography I wanted to utilize in my product.

In the usability tests, I had users complete six tasks within two flows in my prototype:

Flow 1 - Chronic Illness Patient:

1. Add another medical patient portal

2. Create a new health summary packet

Flow 2 - Parent:

1. Switch to their child’s account

2. View notifications

3. Change notification views

4. Change calendar views

Across the five participants, task completion was very strong. All users successfully completed the tasks. The task with the most friction was creating a health packet with a 70% partial success rate. Three users initially missed the dropdown arrows in a table, but ultimately continued on with no issues. Overall, the success rate was 95%, showing an intuitive experience.

I also looked at my product’s System Usability Scale (SUS).

The average score across participants was 94%, which is considered excellent usability. Most participants rated the experience as seamless and intuitive, with participant two scoring slightly lower due to unfamiliarity with medical portals in general.

Problem: Participants 1 and 2 had slight hesitation when connecting a new patient portal, that the list they were looking at was portals already connected.

Solution: I added a clear title to show the portals shown being shown are connected and some subtext for the page for further clarity.

Problem: Participant 2 did not notice the text, noting they would be redirected to the portal login.

Solution: In addition to the text, I included a temporary pop-up that says the user is being redirected to the login portal of the selected system.

Additionally, while it wasn't immediately relevant to the tasks I was exploring in this class, I noticed some terminology hesitation. With new users, they had a harder time with terminology like ‘health packet’ and ‘proxy access’. It just reminded me how useful it could be on a product landing page site to express features, add introductory walkthroughs for new users, and provide helpful descriptors on different elements.

Now lets dive into the final prototype where I implemented improvements from the findings of the usability tests. Watch a walkthrough or navigate yourself below!

Watch a video walkthrough of my prototype