Epocrates | 2010 — 2013
Director, IxD
Epocrates creates one of the most popular reference apps for medical professionals. Epocrates acquired our startup, Modality Inc, in late 2010. When I began working there, the core business relied on advertising revenue from pharmaceutical and medical supply manufacturers. My tenure at Epocrates included managing a team of designers and working on the company’s most popular products.
My Core Responsibilities
Function as design lead to rebuild and redesign the core Epocrates mobile app, used by millions of healthcare professionals. The monthly active users for this app after completing the redesign varied from 200,000-500,000.
After completion of the iPhone app, perform duties of design lead for Epocrates’ first iPad version of the app (the first iPad was released about a year before this!). After its release, the iPad app garnered 30,000-50,000 monthly users.
Lead a team of interaction designers and researchers working on a suite of mobile applications.
Generate design artifacts including: interaction documents, animation prototypes, logic flows, and more.
Produce initial functionality concepts for new work after team brainstorming sessions. Facilitate meetings with the team afterwards to refine the concepts and distribute the workload for the research, interaction, and visual work.
Meet regularly with Product Managers, Engineering leads, and the Medical Information team to ensure on time development, clearly documented specifications, accurate and safe designs.
Tools for App Design
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. Omnigraffle.
Tools for Animation
Adobe After Effects
Tools for iOS/Web projects
HTML/CSS
After working at a start-up, joining a well-established company of over 300 employees offered a fresh perspective. This included increasing the number of stakeholders for each project, which required me to expand my ability to share design rationale and shape the project alongside multiple project managers, commercial managers, marketers, c-level executives, and medical information teams.
The iPhone App
My first project was redesigning the Epocrates main iOS app—followed by an overhaul for the Android app.
The design team for this project included the EVP, UX (Modality’s CEO), myself, and a visual designer.
Our team dove into a lengthy research phase, learning the ins and outs of previous decision making, regulatory rules, and business needs. As part of this phase, I worked extensively with the Medical Info team at Epocrates to understand the underserved use cases and usability issues with the existing set of tools.
Working closely with Product Management and the Medical Information team, I conducted a series of information gathering sessions, typically after creating an analysis document for everyone to review.
Deep learning sessions were often necessary with Med Info in particular, as many tools required a significant understanding of the practitioner’s needs and point of view. I often documented these and included them in style guides for new designs.
In addition to the popular drug lookup tool, the Epocrates app included over a dozen other tools used by medical professionals including:
disease lookup, with information on treatment options and symptom management,
a drug Interaction tool,
a tool for identifying pills,
infectious disease guides,
medical dictionaries,
and much more.
Each one of the tools required various updates and refinements, but also:
an extensive visual overhaul in order to align with the latest UI standards from Apple,
considerable data transformations and cleanup to allow for more precise presentation and navigation capabilities,
designing new interaction flows to allow for clearer user interactions, reduce tendencies for users to “get lost” in information.
The visual redesign was heavily influenced by the VP of Product at Epocrates, who pushed for a specific home screen grid design that was common among apps at the time, having been popularized by Facebook. Within the Epocrates app, the grid highlighted the various tools offered.
A new, streamlined UI applied across tools for increased readability and clearer navigation.
Interaction Check: Often used in a variety of scenarios, from prescribing to emergency evaluations, the drug interaction tool checks for interactions among a patient’s current medicine regiment.
Typography overhaul: Many of the tools utilized web-based views, allowing us to use web approaches to typography styling and formatting. I created HTML pages using CSS templates to meet the new design specs and handed those off to developers for implementing the rest of the system.
Throughout the design and development process, we performed user testing to evaluate working prototypes of various features. The acceptance criteria was set and agreed upon by all of the project’s stakeholders. I was responsible for facilitating the East Coast tests and interviews.
The iPad App
This would be the first iPad app from Epocrates and the increased screen size provided ample opportunities to improve readability and expand tool capabilities beyond what was possible on the iPhone.
Initially there was some hesitancy to implement a wholly new UI. Having just completed a design overhaul for the iPhone, some Product Management and C-suite folks had limited interest in building the iPad interface from the ground up. Some early design explorations helped show the disadvantages of trying to maintain iPhone-like views for iPad.
This was the first 'brute-force' study, essentially elongating the height of the iPhone screens on the iPad, in 3 columns. We experimenting with moving the size and position of the columns, but overall this approach fell short, despite the hope of it being easier to implement.
The next concept was to have 2 distinct panels. One for global navigation and one with browser-like functionality for the display of multiple monographs.
On the left, an early home screen concept. We liked some of the benefits of the busier widgets, but opted for cleaner, simpler, and search centric (as pictured on the right).
Due to all of the research and refinement work on the iPhone app, we had working knowledge of the dozens of reference tools and each of their nuances while translating them to iPad—allowing us to enrich the experience whenever opportunities arose.
The tab view comes up over the home screen, letting users have multple items open at once with each easily selectable. All of the written content was reformatted to take advantage of the increased real estate.
A modal search / browse feature could be launched at any time.
Expanding on the iPhone capabilities, the various medical calculators had a pleasant layout on iPad.
The Pill ID tool required less scrolling, which decreased the amount of time it takes to look up a pill.
Other works
When Epocrates purchased Modality, they also acquired some of the medical information and training titles we built. Over time, we updated many of these titles to include Epocrates branding, while continuing to make various content and feature enhancements to these products, especially those that remained popular in the app store.
In the year running up to AthenaHealth acquiring Epocrates, I spent a significant portion of my time as lead designer on a secure messaging product that would allow doctors and care team members to chat directly with their patients in a HIPPA compliant and encrypted app.
This project continued after acquisition and was eventually integrated into AthenaHealth's cloud-based suite of products for health providers and their patients.