Ampath is one of the largest pathology laboratories in South Africa. Their Ampath Pro app is used by thousands of doctors to view lab results, order tests, and access patient information. Facing strong competition from PathCare and Lancet, Ampath recognized the need for an improved mobile app that would draw doctors to their services and keep them using the platform. They observed a decline in user retention and an increase in complaints about app usability directed to their marketing team. As a result, Ampath approached Specno for an audit and redesign of their app, with a significant focus on making the doctors who use the app central to the project.

I was lead designer and worked with a supplementary designer, scrum master, product owner, frontend developer, external developers & a consultant doctor. My responsibilities included working closely with stakeholders to synthesise user requirements, conducting user research, communicating audit findings and consequent recommendations, managing timelines & expectations, leading the end-to-end redesign process, collaborating closely with Dr. Peta-Anne Browne throughout the project and working with the client's & our internal development team to optimize the designs for implementation.

+ A total of 145 doctors were engaged through interviews, surveys, a WhatsApp group, and usability tests, ensuring that the primary users were integral to the project at every stage.

+ A redesigned app with massively improved navigation, new UI, optimised notification strategy, and greatly improved usability of features, resulting in large increases in user satisfaction & engagement and a massive decrease in churn rate.

+ Designs optimised for development and continued design support during implementation. This included a scalable design system that Ampath will use on other projects as well.

To thoroughly understand the system, align with Ampath's business objectives, and identify issues, we conducted an in-depth product audit. We then redesigned the app, continuously performing usability tests to refine the designs and ensure doctors were satisfied with the results. The processes & deliverables are outlined below:

We conducted a comprehensive product audit, which included competitor analysis, a thorough review and critique of the existing system, and numerous interviews and surveys with doctors. We conducted 19 discovery interviews, and had 85 survey responses. This phase included:

Product Discovery (stakeholder workshops, internal survey & system mapping)

Interviews & Surveys

Product Analytics Analysis (Google Analytics, Apple App Store, Internal Data)

Competitor Analysis

Persona's & Journey Mapping

Heuristic Analysis

Summarising of Key Patterns, Takeaways, & Recommendations

We then redesigned the app, continuously performing usability tests to refine the designs and ensure doctors were satisfied with the results. This phase included:

Layout & Mapping (whiteboard sessions & low fidelity wireframing)

Wireframing & Prototyping

Style Test

High fidelity UI Designs & Prototyping

Usability Testing Interviews

Development Assets & Design System

The previous app sent a push notification for every update. For doctors ordering multiple tests a day, this caused an overwhelm of non-urgent notifications - resulting in many doctors turning notifications off (leading them to miss the critical updates as well) or moving to a competitor.

We identified three objectives:

Reduce notification quantity.

Give users more control.

Increase notification adoption.

We introduced customizable notification preferences, enabling doctors to select which tests they want to receive notifications for. The result:

+ Increase in daily active users.

+ Increase in app engagement.

+ Large reduction in user dissatisfaction.

The app had several navigation and feature discoverability issues, highlighted during our interviews, surveys and heuristic analysis.

Hidden Features: Destinations were hidden in a side menu, leading to many features being undiscovered, including the revenue-driving "Create Order" action.

Navigation Issues: Switching views from results to cumulative results required tapping the patient name, which is unintuitive and against standard mobile navigation practices.

Add-on Tests Visibility: The "Add-on Test" action was only available for 48 hours on a test without clear indication, causing users to miss it, negatively impacting Ampath's revenue.

We identified two objectives:

Simplify navigation.

Improve feature discoverability.

Place more focus on the 3 most requested features.

We reworked the navigation from the ground up, aiming to create a one-page top destination that would allow doctors to immediately create new orders, import patients, and easily view their existing patients & results - matching what doctors had clearly asked for in our surveys and interviews. We included a clear status system & the ability for doctors to flag results or patients they needed to follow up on.

+ Increased discoverability, leading to higher feature usage.

+ Increase in new & add-on orders, resulting in an increase in revenue generation.

+ A large reduction in customer support calls.

Creating an order was hidden and a cumbersome process, leading to the majority of doctors either not finding it or choosing to still submit new orders via a physical paper form.

We had two objectives when redesigning this flow:

Simplify the process, making it as quick as paper.

Improve how the request is received by a patient to be better than paper.

We reworked the flow, making it less intimidating and much more efficient. This was achieved in 5 ways:

Compartmentalising the steps to make them more manageable

Reducing the required fields to only what is critically needed, while still allowing for optional fields.

Adding a "Quick Order" option, a process that mimicked the paper form.

Focused the UI redesign to be as minimal as possible.

Reworked how doctors add patients, copy other doctors, add tests, schedule repeats and add diagnoses.