Mobile Marketing in Health: User Experience Guiding the Implementation of a Medical Booking Application

Abstract

Mobile applications are, on average, faster than mobile websites, provide tailored content (according to the user preferences), and increase the user call to action (by providing notifications and instant updates), leading to an interactive user engagement. In the health care sector, it is also expected that medical appointments booking applications enlarge the accessibility of the health care services – providing broad access to the medical health professional CV and making available other patients reviews of the service. The research described in this paper presents an effort in the identification of the main uses for mobile marketing in the health sector, by describing four major use cases, namely: i) searching for an appointment, ii) booking a medical appointment, iii) history of the medical appointments, iv) alerts for future appointments, and v) mobile marketing. A mobile marketing app implementation is then described including i) the book medical appointment process, ii) the user onboarding, iii) the approach on prioritize search before login, iv) the mobile push notifications, and v) the user information logging. The results achieved are assessed and improved through an iterative testing approach, that provided important feedback to the development process. Additionally, user testing was performed in four scenarios. The mobile application developed present auspicious user experience results which promises a high adoption rate by real world users.