Tricare Online Patient Portal – Concept Design | Mobile Apps | User Experience Research | Visual Design | Graphics | Adobe Photoshop | Computers | Octopus.do | March 2023
Here’s the catch: Military members and their families must use Tricare’s online patient portal to schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, text doctors and access medical records/test results. The website is very difficult to use and has a poor responsive design, making it difficult for people to use the basic functionality of the portal. Many service members I spoke to gave up trying to use the portal, choosing instead to call clinics or make appointments and face long waits.
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Tricare Online Patient Portal
Solution: The Tricare Online Patient Portal application is designed to provide service members and their families with efficient and affordable options for accessing/utilizing their healthcare services. The TOPP application is aimed at military personnel and their adult dependents.
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Military members and their families wanted a Tricare patient portal app where they could easily schedule appointments, search for prescriptions, message their care team and access lab results.
To begin my research, I conducted a survey through Tali with 7 active military personnel and 2 adult dependents (spouses). The purpose of the survey was to understand how they currently interact with the Tricare portal, what barriers they face, and what features they would like to see included if an app were created. In addition to the statistics below, users expressed some of their current main dissatisfaction with the portal: difficulty logging in, slow loading times, and the inability to use it on mobile devices.
Since the audience for this project is quite broad (all service members and their families), I tried to represent as many people as possible through both characters. It was designed based on quantitative and qualitative data from my user interviews and surveys.
To help me deepen my empathy and better visualize user processes, I created two user journey maps.
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Given the data I collected, my research clearly showed that users have 4 main purposes for using the app: making appointments, refilling prescriptions, messaging the care team, and getting lab results. With this in mind, I set about creating a sitemap.
After the research phase, I began exploring the layout of the site through sketches – determining what I thought would be most useful to users and establishing content for predictable design patterns. Through sketching, I also decided to add a visual progress bar to the appointment and prescription refill process.
After a few screen sketches, I settled on a basic layout and then moved on to a low-fidelity design. I use low-fidelity mockups to establish a visual hierarchy that draws attention to the features users need most.
After conducting a series of usability studies, I realized that I had forgotten a major problem among my users:
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In addition to the “problem of not being able to make an appointment”, there is also the issue of accessibility for users with limited flexibility, who may have difficulty achieving small goals. Small circles can be a challenge for these users, so in addition to making the circles clickable, I also made the text clickable to make the target larger and subsequently easier to reach.
I wanted the app’s visual design to be as simple and inclusive as possible, helping users get into the mainstream easily. I was careful to make sure the text was large enough for visually impaired users to see without distraction and to include a mix of illustrations to blend with the text. I also made sure the colors met the WCAG contrast accessibility standards. I used a blue color scheme considering that most users associate the color blue with competence and reliability.
If this was an actual project I was working on, rather than a conceptual design, there might be some limitations that could affect the design of the app. Some possible limitations are:
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