NextStep: Outpatient Rehabilitation

Challenge

Scattered guidance, poor visibility

Medical professionals provide patients with recovery instructions after discharge, but information is often spread across leaflets, printouts, and verbal guidance. This makes it hard for patients to remember their exercises and for clinicians to track adherence or progress.

Initial user research surfaced four key themes:

• Patients found the rehabilitation process underwhelming
• Patients wanted more consistent follow-up and progress tracking
• Clinicians wanted clearer communication tools
• Patients often struggled to follow plans due to pain, memory, motivation, anxiety, or social and financial circumstances

My Contribution

What I owned on this project

My responsibilities on the team covered:

• Research: conducted user research to understand patient and clinician needs, identifying key pain points around post-discharge guidance, as well as user flows and IA
• Sketching: early ideation through hand sketches to explore the contact section UX and UI before committing to screens
• Wireframing: translated sketches for the contact section into low fidelity wireframes to define structure, content hierarchy, and key user flows
• Testing: co-planned and co-ran usability testing sessions, analysed findings, and fed insights back into the design

Process

From research to a tested, high-fidelity prototype

Information Architecture

Structuring content around patient needs

Before moving into visual design, we mapped out the full information architecture to ensure patients could reach core tasks within one or two taps.

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User Flows

Key journeys through the app

We mapped the primary user flows for the patients, identifying decision points, error states, and opportunities to reduce friction in common tasks such as logging an exercise or reviewing a patient's progress.

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Sketches

Early ideation on paper

Initial sketches were used to rapidly explore layout options and interaction patterns before committing to digital wireframes. This low-fidelity stage helped the team align on structure and identify potential usability issues early.

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Design Evolution

From wireframes to high-fidelity

The design went through several iterations based on peer feedback and informal walkthroughs. Key changes included simplifying the home dashboard, improving the exercise logging flow, and introducing a progress visualisation that resonated with patients.

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Guerrilla Testing

Quick feedback from real-world users

5 guerrilla testing sessions were conducted with participants approached in public settings. They were asked to complete short tasks on early prototypes, providing honest, unfiltered reactions. Key pain points identified:

• Unclear button labelling on the recommended community screen
• Unclear scrolling behaviour - the app did not appear scrollable
• The confirm details button on the appointment confirmation screen was too small
• The "+" label on the appointment screen was added to the bottom right of the screen

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Testing

Validating usability with real users

5 moderated usability testing sessions were conducted with participants representing the target patient demographic. Sessions followed a think-aloud protocol covering the core patient flows, with findings scored using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Changes made following testing:

• Increased appointment button size for easier interaction
• Added scrolling affordances to make navigation clearer
• Reduced information density on busier screens
• Added a congratulation message when joining a community

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Results

High usability and confident users

The final prototype focused on four core areas: daily exercises, appointments, community pages and progress tracking. Testing suggested that patients felt more confident about what to do at home, while clinicians responded positively to the idea of reviewing progress more clearly between visits.

NextStep demonstrated that patients valued simplicity and clarity above all, particularly the ability to see their plan at a glance and get exercise instructions without needing to contact their clinical team.

Design System

NextStep visual design system

The tokens and components defined for the NextStep app, covering colour, typography, spacing, radius, effects, and stroke.

Icons