CareQueue

Healthcare UX · Mobile

Timeline

Sep. 2024 - Dec. 2024

Tool

Figma

Contribution Type

Teamwork

Project Overview

CareQueue is a digital healthcare platform designed to reduce patient wait times and improve the overall clinic experience. By focusing on both patient needs and clinic efficiency, CareQueue helps create a smoother, more transparent, and less stressful healthcare journey.

Team Project

Team Members: Esther Lee, Amanda Wang, Cynthia Du, Ashley Hu

Problem

Newly graduated nurses face overwhelming workloads and patient communication challenges, leading to burnout and reduced quality of care.

Solution

A smart notification system that helps nurses manage patient expectations, reassign tasks during breaks, and strengthen patient connections.

Target Audience

New graduate and early-career nurses in high-pressure environments such as ERs and hospitals.

HMW

How might we help newly graduated registered nurses manage their workloads more effectively, while fostering deeper patient connections, to reduce burnout and improve patient care?

HMW

How might we help newly graduated registered nurses manage their workloads more effectively, while fostering deeper patient connections, to reduce burnout and improve patient care?

HMW

How might we help newly graduated registered nurses manage their workloads more effectively, while fostering deeper patient connections, to reduce burnout and improve patient care?

HMW

How might we help newly graduated registered nurses manage their workloads more effectively, while fostering deeper patient connections, to reduce burnout and improve patient care?

User & Problem Context

User & Problem Context

User Storyboard: Walk through Devon’s daily struggles → balancing critical care with patient communication → introduces the pain point.

Research & Insights

Research & Insights

User Modeling

User Modeling

Through behavioral continuums and user type matrices, we mapped different nurse profiles to identify the ER nurse as our primary focus.

Design Exploration

Design Exploration

Paper prototypes:
Nurse tasks (notify patient, update wait-time, respond to alerts, take a break).
Patient tasks (add family, join chat, request updates, message nurse).

Usability Testing

Usability Testing

Key findings (e.g., confusing navigation icons, too many steps in leave-a-note flow).
Observations: nurses struggled to find patients, patients confused by unclear icons.

Click here to check the full video collection. These videos capture authentic user reactions during our testing sessions. We later revisited them to identify and document user responses for further analysis.

Click here to check the full video collection. These videos capture authentic user reactions during our testing sessions. We later revisited them to identify and document user responses for further analysis.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes(Part)

Low-Fidelity Wireframes(Part)

Prototype

Prototype

Our prototype incorporates familiar iOS design patterns, such as the alarm setting system, keyboard typing, and notification to create a realistic experience.

Reflection

We learned how to conduct both primary research (interviews, quotes, observations) and secondary research (literature, statistics, reports), and how to combine them to strengthen our design direction.
This process taught us the importance of balancing real user voices with existing data to uncover actionable insights.

Future Improvements

Future improvements: broaden research across nurse roles, test in real hospital settings, and continue validating with both users and existing systems.