Easylabs.org UX Design & Research Internship

Easylabs.org Internship Background

When people go to the doctor and the doctor orders laboratory blood tests, the results that come back are usually only understood by doctors or those who really research their own health issues. Often, the blood test results don’t provide any context or suggest any lifestyle changes that the patients need to take. The founder of Easylabs.org, based out of Toronto, devised the platform and service to help the public with knowing what to do about their blood test results.

Currently, Easylabs.org is in its very early stages and provides a generalist health interpretation for free. All users need to do is enter their gender and age before filling out the results of their tests. Other parts of the website describe the various types of health interpretations and advice that will be provided including: women’s health, mental health, sports medicine, and aging. In the future, the founder plans to implement these health interpretations and charge a small fee for each interpretation.

This four-week project was completed with the aim of tackling issues with the overall user experience. Easylabs.org works to help patients decipher the meaning of their lab reports from different areas of medical perspectives and they were seeking help in improving the experience of site visitors.

As the sole designer and researcher working with the needs of this company, I came to understand the obstacles and needs of health care providers and personnel in interpreting patient lab reports. My first experience working with a company also helped me to realize the logistics and mechanics of how UI/UX designers work in the real world.

Roles & Responsibilities

As the only UI/UX design student working with Easylabs.org at the time, my responsibilities during the course of this project were to highlight any UX design issues with the current iteration of the site as well as to immerse myself and test participants in the Easylabs.org user experience in order to root out any pain points or previously unmet desires.

In this solo team, my role was to serve as a UI/UX designer in order to root out any noticeable issues.

Scope & Constraints

The primary constraint of this project was the three-hour time difference as I worked in California and the Easylabs.org team was based in Toronto, Canada. All calls and discussions occurred over email or Zoom meetings.

Furthermore, Easylabs.org was in the midst of rapid company expansion and a website overhaul. Their team emphasized that these changes to the current iteration of the website wouldn’t be kept for much longer as the new site layout was nearing its final stages.

Findings

At the time of my internship, I spent time conversing with the founder and hearing about the company’s needs and workings. I came to learn that the platform hadn’t yet gained the traction needed to be generating many lab report interpretations for users yet. When I’d asked about the general demographics using the platform, the founder only reported that the majority of the individuals accessing the Easylabs.org platform were middle-aged women.

By the end of all usability testing for this iteration of the website, the three most important findings provided to the design team were:

1. Lack of color contrast - all users experienced visibility issues when discerning text and entry fields on the platform. This contributed to a high time-on-task score for the platform.

2. Low system usability scale score - all users expressed that the current platform wasn’t intuitive, easy to navigate, and that they were unlikely to use the platform the way it currently was.

3. Individual health concerns not being taken into account - the platform assumes users are otherwise healthy individuals when they enter their data. The platform’s suggestions for health improvement might be at odds with the user’s health conditions. For example, a diabetic user may not simply just add more fruit to their diets as the increased sugar intake would be of great concern.

Most importantly, the company was in discussions with their legal team and had run into the roadblock of not being able to carry on the platform the way it currently was due to FDA regulations in the United States as well as liability issues concerned providing free medical interpretations to individuals who would interpret the results as hard medical advice.

By the end of my time spent working with Easylabs.org, Tom stated that the future direction of the company would be to transition the platform towards providing veterinary advice due to less strict regulations regarding providing health tips to pet owners. In the meantime, I was able to help provide my insights on the current state of the platform and small details to change in order to better the current user experience.

Accessibility Audit

As an individual with red-green colorblindness, I felt it was important to run an accessibility audit to see if any part of the site would require adjusting. I did this by turning screens into grayscale with Sketch and seeing if anything would be indiscernible. In the results page of the lab report interpretation, there was a minor detail that proved difficult to see in grayscale.

Design Aspect

Earlier in the project, I’d quickly pointed out certain details that could enhance the platform appearance to better suit visitors. Formerly, the results page featured warnings and disclaimers with simple red letters on a white background. I suggested colored banners with white letters which the Easylabs.org team incorporated quickly.

Whereas the results page initially listed a color bar without lines denoting optimal ranges of results, I suggested adding a color gradient to highlight the “safe zone” or results and the severity of results falling out of healthy range.

Originally, the image of Dr. Kat Kremblewski was centered with the text under her image. I suggested moving her image to the left of the banner and placing the text to the right of the image, which the team also incorporated after my meeting with them.

Outcome & Lessons

The Easylabs.org design team took my UI design suggestions and immediately implemented those changes, but the founder ultimately felt that further more complicated changes were at this point unnecessary as the company had decided to change directions to address the veterinary world. The fast pace and direction of the company was evident as so much had changed between the beginning of my time working with them and the end of my four-week period working with them and the founder. I learned about how goals could rapidly change with new directions being taken by the company. The problem Easylabs.org was initially trying to tackle could not be ultimately addressed due to FDA oversight and liability issues tied to their goal of offering medical advice to users.

However, in late April, the Easylabs.org design team rolled out the newly updated platform. Using many changed I’d suggested to the platform, the team worked out a much easier format that increased usability and excitement with the product.

Next steps I would advise are to allow for more time in testing the current iteration of the platform. This may involve A/B testing or eye tracking to determine what it is on each page that might confuse or make users spend more time on certain tasks. While the new platform takes into account certain medical/health conditions (vegan diet, cardiovascular issues, smokers, auto-immune disorders), more conditions must be implemented to provide safer and more beneficial lifestyle changes to improve the lives of all users.

Due to my background working in pharmaceuticals and health care, the founder invited me to work with the team providing both my scientific and medical expertise as well as helping the team to identify key UI/UX design issues as well as UX research further down the road. I greatly enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to work with this company at the crossroads of my current field of health care and UI/UX design.

With a calming color gradient to highlight the difference in results (calming soothing blue in the middle and red on the outer edges), the new results bar helps the user see how they rate on the bar spatially and with color. Users with color-blindness would be able to detect the brightness differences, allowing for equitable design.