UX Case Study:
Happy Saplings Health Management
Case Study – Overview
The Product
Happy Saplings is a streamlined health management app that enables parents to review their children’s health records, print the records to meet school or camp requirements, and see when their children’s healthcare visits are due.
The initial parameters and design goals of this family health management app were prompted by a UX Design course offered through the Google Career Certificate program.
Project Duration
December 2024-May 2025
The Problem
Parents of children and teens have limited time, energy, focus, and financial resources to devote to managing the intricacies and obstacles surrounding the preparation and tracking of children’s health records to appropriately meet their children’s school or camp requirements with ease and effectiveness.
The Goal
The family health management app Happy Saplings will let users coordinate health visits and records or documentation to match school/camp requirements and provide streamlined avenues to make submissions to or contact with relevant organizations. This function will affect parents of children and teens by making different steps of coordinating care and fulfilling school/camp requirements more accessible and less stressful to complete when they are on the go, as well as giving them peace of mind and a sense of security by having all the children’s information in one place.
We will measure effectiveness by analyzing the number of health records viewed and printed as well as the number of health visits viewed and confirmed within the app.
Role & Responsibilities
UX Researcher/Designer
My role within the UX Case Study for Happy Saplings: A Health Management App is that of a researcher, designer, and most importantly student. As a learning experience rooted in real-world needs and working with hypothetical interview information, this project is a practical application of design theory and fundamentals. My responsibilities included everything feasibly needed to move the project from the initial phases of empathizing with users and researching their needs and pain points to creating personas, defining the problem, and outlining the unique value propositions of the Happy Saplings App.
Understanding the User
User Research: Summary
User research is a key aspect of how designers create empathy for their users and their experience as they use a product that addresses their needs and wants. The user research for the Happy Saplings project sought to reach a wide range of potential users and address potential design biases early in the process.
Information from Users
The user research for this project involved conducting short interviews (provided by Google) and collecting biographical information from a varied population of different backgrounds and family compositions. This diversity of perspective was important to consider while examining the limitations and differences of any potential user.
Assumptions
Prior to conducting research, the design team’s assumptions about user needs centered around the need to lessen stress and provide help with organizing responsibilities for parents on the go. On the surface, it seemed that tracking health/medical information and compiling information from different organizations in a way that meets a variety of requirements and timelines was a stressful process that was difficult to track well.
These general assumptions did indeed hold to be true from the interviews—however, there was additional interest around saving time and money in all aspects of childcare that wasn’t thought about specifically beforehand. It was important to include the idea of limited resources while dealing with health document requirements for schools/camps within the design parameters for this project.
Initial Takeaways
Overall, the early takeaways from the user research around parents who needed to manage healthcare information for their children as they enabled access to schools/camps were the following:
Parents have limited time, energy, and financial resources—which puts a strain on their personal and family lives.
The amount of disparate information, requirements, and processes involved with child healthcare and school/camp requirements can be overwhelming to manage.
Tracking timelines, due dates, and healthcare visits is a resource-intensive process.
User Research: Pain Points
Pain Point: User overwhelm and stress
It is easy for people to feel overwhelmed by the demands on their time and are looking for ways to manage that stress.
Design goal: clearly lay out needs and priorities to help users understand what needs to happen when.
Pain Point: User frustration and time considerations
Some users are frustrated by hard-to-use tools or tasks that take longer than they’d like, considering everything else they have going on.
Design goal: make an easy-to-use system that is simple to access and navigate to minimize time spent accomplishing tasks.
Pain Point #3: User confusion and obstacles to their success
Some users are confused by systems, communication processes, or the speed at which information is given in different environments, which can cause stress and anxiety.
Design goal: allow users to personalize how they access healthcare information to match their needs/preferences and have the app provide helpful prompts or reminders.
Pain Point #4: User limitations and management of resources
A shared pain point for many users is the challenge of managing time, health, and money, and feeling like it is difficult to do so in their lives.
Design goal: options for how to manage time commitments, duration of attention, and effective costs when dealing with healthcare management.
Persona
Problem Statement:
Deanna is an active, working single mother who needs a quick, intuitive, and easy-to-use way to manage her child’s health records and doctor visits to help meet school/camp requirements. This is important to her because it’s confusing and stressful to handle so many administrative tasks from different organizations in the midst of her already busy schedule and existing day-to-day activities.
Persona (Deanna):
User Journey Maps: Summary
Deanna’s user journey revolves around accessing, compiling, and submitting information regarding her teenager’s health records and school/camp requirements. While each step of the various goals she has to accomplish is simple, there are actually a large number of decision points and obstacles to accomplishing things like accessing health records and ensuring health visits are planned in a way that fills school/camp requirements.
Because of the multiple points of entry and potential points of failure, Deanna’s hypothetical thought processes around her child’s health record management range from hope and excitement to confusion and anxiety.
The biggest pain points for Deanna as a main persona for whom to design ultimately highlight too many options, too much ambiguity around how to succeed, and stress around failure for something that matters to her family.
User Journey Maps: Graphics
Thinking Ahead on Design
With the initial phases of user research completed and having intentionally taken steps to understand the user, I proceeded to elaborate on the goals, considerations, and parameters that will define the final design of the Happy Saplings health management app. In particular, I focused on a variety of hypothesis statements to further the problem statement tied to Deanna’s persona—and continued to develop unique value propositions that will set this product apart for potential users.
Hypothesis Statements
Hypothesis Statement #1:
If Deanna downloads an app that collects and displays health requirements in a quick and easy way, then she can help make sure her daughter’s health records are in order for upcoming school/camp activities.
Hypothesis Statement #2:
Deanna needs an app that can organize, categorize, filter, and display both health requirements and associated dates for health visits so that her daughter will have the necessary health records to allow her to participate in school/camp activities.
Hypothesis Statement #3:
If Deanna can schedule or input health visit dates easily and compare them against health requirements for school/camp activities that her daughter participates in on a mobile app, then she can help make sure her daughter is set up for success while continuing to focus on her job and various hobbies and interests.
Value Propositions
The following are this product’s unique value propositions that address users’ needs:
Family and child profiles that are easy to update and access
Friendly, conversational prompts and reminders with accessibility options
Centralized place to save and access all health information
Shortcuts, links, and saved information to various organizations
One-click options to print, access, and export health information for each child
Auto-fill options for schools/camps and health organizations’ information from a searchable database
Customizable and auto-updating calendar or alternative view of health visit dates and submission deadlines
Auto-generated templates of email or phone scripts to use when contacting or submitting to various organizations
Integrated email support to allow sending emails with attachments directly from within the app
Multiple ways to export, view, and/or print information for each profile
Easy-to-read and customizable icons, buttons, and visual language
Next Steps
Moving forward in the design process brings us to ideation and design. The immediate next steps involve ideating and early design iterations involving standard brainstorming, wireframing, and prototyping techniques. This process will be done with the end-to-end design framework in mind, naturally leading into testing and iteration as the design team continues with usability studies and refining the design to bring everything toward a polished and finished product.
Starting the Design
The early stages of design will include aspects of standard design practice, including the following:
Paper Wireframes
Digital Wireframes
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Usability Studies
To truly be able to iterate, design requires user testing, and here is where usability will come into play through reaching an online user base to test and evaluate the current, testable prototypes. Gathering data on these user interactions and feedback will allow further polishing and innovation as the design moves closer to meeting user needs as closely as possible with a unique product.
Refining the Design
The polish and refinement of the product design will take the Happy Saplings app toward a final product that can be realistically released to a successful public reception. It will involve the following key aspects of design iteration:
Mock-ups
High-Fidelity Prototype
Accessibility Considerations
Takeaways
As a course-based project and case study, the Happy Saplings family healthcare management app has continued to challenge and delight me as a creative professional exploring the foundations and guiding principles of UX design.
From operating within an established framework to applying principles within a realistic scenario, I have been able to focus on the early stages of designing a successful product—which may well not be as flashy or eye-catching as the more visual stages of prototyping. However, this important early phase of understanding the user and conducting due diligence around users’ pain points, needs, and perspectives is something I wanted to truly take my time on and dig into in this Google Careers guided program.
Having completed these early stages of the design process, while keeping an eye on the overall structure of the path to a viable commercial product, I feel more motivated, confident, and curious about the next steps to come in making this product a reality.