PRODUCT DESIGN

Solace

Dashboard

Design System

Health Tech

TEAM

2 Designers •

1 Design Lead

3 Product Managers

4 Engineers

DURATION

3 Weeks

CONTRIBUTIONS

Interaction Design

Design Systems

Prototyping

TLDR;

SOLACE pairs patients with health advocates who help handle the logistics of care, which can range from organizing insurance calls to coordinating other events like surgical procedures and physician follow-ups.

However, patients have no way to view any of their upcoming care. Advocate calls and outside appointments existed in separate places with nothing that can help connect them in any way.

The Care Calendar helps consolidate both. I designed its entry point on the patient dashboard, along with the event card system and detail flow behind it.

CONTEXT

The Purpose of Solace

Solace pairs 220k+ active patients with health advocates. During such cases, a verified benefit can wind up leading to a scheduled procedure. A located specialist can become an exam on a Tuesday.

Care has been scattered across places the patient had to assemble themselves.

Appointments are what the advocate's work turns into, which makes a shared view of them the clearest way for patient and advocate to stay on the same page. Advocates have a calendar of every patient they are paired with, while patients have no equivalent feature: no place showcasing what is being scheduled, what has passed, or what is coming next.

While patients could get scheduled on a call or by messaging their advocate, viewing said events was the main problem. While the advocate card shows the next upcoming visit, anything beyond that visit is simply just not surfaced.

Our team's answer was a Care Calendar: a hub that can hold both past, internal, and external events.

Feature Priorities

ENTRY POINTS

"UPCOMING EVENT" HEADER

Calendar nav icon

SIDE MENU

MAIN FEATURES

EVENT CARDS

EVENT DETAILS POP-UP

REMINDERS

UPCOMING EVENT VIEW

PAST EVENT VIEW

RESCHEDULE OPTION

THE PROBLEM

The Care Calendar is a destination point, and destinations only work if people are able to arrive there.

The dashboard was where patients initially land after Sign-In. My question was figuring out how to surface a door that could lead the patient into the Care Calendar.

OUR OLD DASHBOARD

The Patient Dashboard is already full. Every surface had already been spoken for with an important feature that leads back to the central tiles.

How can I surface the Calendar in any way without competing with all the other information/features that the page is built around?

THE PROCESS

Scoping the Entry Point

01. VISIT TILE BLOCKS

ITERATION A

ITERATION B

The Pros

  • Gives Upcoming Events tile more prominent space

  • Good scalability on desktop

The Cons

  • Lots of containers, winds up looking too block-y

  • Takes up lots of space, may also distract the patient from main visit tile

02. WITHIN THE CARE CALENDAR

The Pros

  • No new container has to be added

  • Relative information condensed together into a continuous story/timeline (future and past events)

The Cons

  • "This Month" section is buried extremely far in mobile view and "The Latest From Your Advocate" takes over priority of "Accomplishments"

  • Side rail is secondary to page; calls far less attention

03. A VERSION WE LIKED BUT DIDN'T BUILD

While my team did like this iteration, this was out of the scope and time constraints for the engineering team to build.

The Pros

  • Dates visible at a glance

  • Closer parity with the Care Calendar

  • Has room for multiple events

The Cons

  • New interaction states to define and build

  • Marginal gain over the sub-header

THE SOLUTION: THE SUBHEADER

The date and greeting at the top of the page were already there and did not carry heavy visual weight. I decided to place the event line inside that block, adding information without adding any unnecessary structure.

The Pros

  • Easier visibility at the top

  • Clear doorway to the specific event page/care calendar

  • Clean and straightforward

The Cons

  • Longer event titles sit awkwardly on mobile → Added truncation rules

THE PROCESS

The Care Calendar

I worked with my team to create the Care Calendar from scratch. While they worked on the flow and layout, I had to figure out what fills it.

THE PROCESS

I incorporated Event Cards with a cohesive color and typography system

SOLACE EVENTS

PAST SOLACE EVENTS

EXTERNAL EVENTS

PAST EXTERNAL EVENTS

THE PROCESS

& the Pop-Up that opens when a patient selects a specific card.

SOLACE EVENTS

EXTERNAL EVENTS

NOTIFICATIONS EDITING

THE SOLUTION

My Reflections

Two of my explorations added a block to the dashboard, and both failed for the same reason: the page was already full of containers. Using space that already existed is better than making more. I'd test that assumption earlier next time.

The version we liked best was the one we didn't build. Knowing what your team can and can't ship in the time available is a real constraint, and designing for it is something that's very important to consider.

Product design lives just as much inside the conversations and tradeoffs as it does in the file. Each round of feedback was a chance to ask better questions and pull the design into somewhere stronger.

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