Hims & Hers
The backend that supports the first touch point for patients
In my role as a Digital Product Designer specializing in Internal Tools, I collaborated within a lean, nimble team comprised of just two designers. Together, we were responsible for crafting comprehensive design systems and delivering impactful features that catered to both our clinicians, customers, and our internal team.
Connecting patients with clinicians using important data
Each day, Hims & Hers welcomes both new and returning patients seeking treatment for a diverse range of conditions within our offerings. To ensure a superior level of patient care and provide clinicians with precise patient information for accurate treatment, we employ an internally developed tool tailored for crafting intake forms. The problem here is this internal tool hasn’t been changed since the birth of the company. It is confusing for any new team members who need to work on it.
I closely worked with Product Managers and Engineering teams to thoroughly understand our needs and constraints when revamping the intake forms. Our aim was to make them clearer and more efficient on a larger scale, benefiting the platform support teams. Together, we determined which elements were still necessary, what we could remove, and how we could improve them.
Intake forms purpose
The internal intake form tool is quite intricate, featuring many interconnected parts. It's the first place patients go to share important information with our clinicians, and it's a valuable resource for our Product team to create and update intake forms for all our products. Our clinicians and Product team worked together to create the questions in the intake forms, helping clinicians make better decisions about patient suitability.
Parent questions, child questions, sub-child questions
Working closely with the Product and engineering teams, we brainstormed the first version of our new intake forms system. One of our main concerns was making it easier to see all the questions at once. Some questions have follow-up questions that only appear if you answer the main question in a certain way. So, we had to figure out how to show these related questions when needed.
Essential features included a question pool and a drag-and-drop capability for efficiently arranging an extensive set of questions within a form.
Speed is everything
Using a collaborative approach to address issues as they arose helped us quickly develop the new intake form system. This also allowed us to see the system being built alongside the designs, making it easier to identify what worked and what needed improvement. It was beneficial to work with users who were our colleagues since user research was much easier compared to traditional testing.
The new intake form will not only be more user-friendly for newcomers, but it's expected to speed up the intake form process by 20% in the coming months. We're also retiring the old intake form system, which is why we have a tight project timeline.
Defining a decentralized design system for design + engineering
Design systems are excellent for maintaining a consistent look and efficient processes across a wide range of projects. However, they can sometimes struggle to keep up with the changing needs of the teams that use them. While working on the initial version of the intake form tool, I had to double-check our design system in Storybook to make sure it was up to date. This step ensures that our engineers can work efficiently and avoid issues later in the development process.
