Description:

International SOS is in the business of saving and protecting lives, and they are one of the world’s leading health and security companies. They provide clinics and healthcare professionals to many of the world’s largest companies for their workers. They have over 2,000 clinics in over 200 countries, supporting around 1 million employees and taking approximately 4 million assistance calls every year.

The ‘COVID effect’ (and subsequent restrictions) meant seeing a healthcare provider in some countries became increasingly difficult. Yet, International SOS and their clients still wanted to provide employees with the same level of care as they had previously received.
International SOS approached our company to create a teleconsultation Medical Services mobile app that would enable workers to get the support and care they needed at the touch of a (mobile phone) button.

We worked with a broad stakeholder group based in India, UAE, USA, UK and New Zealand. The process was highly collaborative, with a high degree of communication and agreement required.

Working in Agile sprints, we began the process by focusing on the visual design, including wireframes, UI, colours, illustrations and icons. An exciting challenge for us was that International SOS had traditionally been very ‘corporate’ in their branding. However, for this hero project, they were open to us pushing the look and feel. So we were able to incorporate illustrations and a broader colour palette to create a friendly, consumer-facing, exciting app.
We had to be careful to remember that people using this app would need some form of support (such as a medical emergency or an issue). The face of the app had to be empathetic, friendly, approachable and not too clinical.
All of our UX and UI decisions were back by data science. We worked with both Waterfall and Agile methodologies, incorporating Agile Ceremonies wherever possible (such as Retrospectives).

As we went through the design process, we created wireframes and prototypes to sketch out our thoughts around executing the project; then, we moved into the design phase. We did extensive user testing to validate our ideas and capture the voice of our customers. We compiled the data captured from this testing to inform customer journey decisions, user flows, insights, registrations, subscriptions, etc.
Our new Medical Services App offers the user two main options. In the ‘book a teleconsultation’ section, the user can select a date, time, language, medical speciality required and a preferred doctor, then submit their request to the International SOS team. The ‘chat to a medical professional’ section works as a live chat. With this feature, you can send an audio file, video, images, and text-based messages to interact directly with a medical professional.

The Medical Services App takes a potentially clinical and corporate interaction and humanises the experience for vulnerable patients. We’ve combined a warm and inviting interface with intelligent, easy-to-use features and – in the process – have helped to transform the working lives of around 1 million people worldwide!