The Most Popular Programming Languages in 2023

The HealthTech inductry is developing rapidly: according to Statista, by the end of 2024, its global capitalization is expected to reach a record 610.20 billion US dollars. This growth is driven by increasing demand for advanced healthcare solutions, especially as the number of digital offerings in this sector rises. With this growth comes intensified competition, pushing organizations to focus on building user loyalty by enhancing the quality of their services. In the healthcare context, providing a top-tier user experience (UX) becomes essential for driving user satisfaction and engagement. This article delves into the principles, challenges, and best practices for crafting exceptional UX in MedTech, telemedicine, and digital health solutions.

HealthTech Market Overview

One of the largest segments of the medtech market is medical equipment, which is projected to reach $511.20 billion in capitalization by 2024. Key areas of development include:

• Diagnostics and intervention: Innovative tools for early detection and treatment of diseases.
• Genetic research: Advanced solutions to decode and leverage genetic data.
• Patient mobility: Technologies that improve access and convenience for patients, especially those with chronic conditions.

This evolution is largely influenced by an aging global population, which drives sustained investment in healthcare technology. To remain competitive, medtech companies must integrate cutting-edge systems and focus on wearables, telemedicine, and personalized healthcare UX design to deliver unparalleled user experiences.

The Role of Telemedicine in Healthcare UX

Telemedicine has transformed healthcare delivery by enabling remote consultations, diagnosis, and treatment through digital platforms. Its success depends heavily on intuitive UX design, ensuring that both patients and healthcare providers can interact seamlessly.

Key UX Considerations for Telemedicine:

1. Real-Time Accessibility: Patients and doctors must connect effortlessly through video calls, chats, and data-sharing interfaces, regardless of their device or location.
2. Intuitive Navigation: Complex interfaces can delay care. Clear layouts and straightforward workflows are essential for urgent medical situations.
3. Security and Compliance: Telemedicine platforms must protect sensitive health data, adhering to HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulatory standards.
4. Integration with EHR/EMR Systems: To provide seamless care, telemedicine solutions must integrate with electronic health records, ensuring real-time access to patient histories and reports.
5. User Support: Telemedicine systems should include built-in assistance features, such as chatbots or FAQs, to guide users through the platform.

In turn, a well-thought-out medical UX design can speed up the execution of targeted actions by users, minimize the risk of errors, and generally reduce the cognitive load that new users of a particular digital solution face the first time.

Digital Health and Personalized Care

Digital health encompasses a broad range of solutions, including fitness apps, chronic disease management platforms, and AI-driven diagnostic tools. Personalization is at the heart of digital health, enabling tailored care for individual patients.

Key Elements of Personalization in Digital Health UX:

1. Adaptive Dashboards: Dashboards that adjust to display metrics relevant to specific users, such as glucose levels for diabetics or activity levels for fitness enthusiasts.
2. AI-Powered Recommendations: Leveraging wearable data and patient history to provide personalized health insights, such as medication reminders or lifestyle adjustments.
3. Behavioral Nudges: Notifications and reminders based on real-time data from wearables, such as prompts to stay active or alerts for irregular heart rates.
4. Collaborative Tools: Features that allow patients to share health progress with their healthcare providers, enabling more informed decision-making.‍
5. Data Visualization: Simplified visuals, such as graphs and heat maps, to help patients understand complex health data without requiring medical expertise.

Integration with Wearables

Wearable devices are enabling real-time data collection and fostering proactive patient care. These devices, including fitness trackers, smartwatches, and specialized medical wearables, provide essential metrics such as heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns, and oxygen levels.

To stay relevant in the modern healthcare ecosystem, medtech systems must:

1. Seamlessly integrate with wearables: Facilitate data synchronization from devices to centralized healthcare systems.
2. Enable flexibility: Support compatibility with various devices to cater to diverse patient needs.
3. Enhance real-time insights: Convert wearable data into actionable metrics that healthcare providers and patients can use to make informed decisions.

Integration with wearables empowers healthcare providers to:

• Monitor patients remotely, reducing hospital visits.
• Leverage AI-powered analytics to predict health deterioration.
• Tailor personalized care plans based on real-time patient data.

What Is HealthTech UX Design?

Healthcare UX design focuses on creating digital healthcare solutions that are functional, visually appealing, and accessible to all users, including patients and medical staff. A well-executed healthcare UX design reduces cognitive load, minimizes errors, and speeds up workflows in stressful environments.

“When designing for the Healthcare industry, it is crucial to keep in mind that every solution you create affects your users’ health – therefore, you cannot afford to produce half-baked or generic solutions as it puts someone’s well-being at risk. Cater to your users, make your design accessible, and ensure that your solutions are consistent and flexible across all mediums – that’s how you create a truly excellent and literally life-changing product”

Ivan Hohanov, Head of UX

Providing a premium user experience should be one of the fundamental goals in any business sector. However, when it comes to the provision of medical services, often the achievement of this goal is the only possible option to provide some patients with a specific service, which can be explained either by temporary restrictions in mobility or by the presence of permanent mental or physical disabilities. This actually causes the need to create digital solutions according to the principles of simplicity, intuitiveness, and ergonomics.

It is noteworthy that medical personnel are no less in need of advanced user experience in healthcare software products, as they are often forced to act urgently in stressful situations and follow error-free decisions.

Key Principles of HealthTech UX Design

Let's look at a few fundamental principles underlying effective UX design for healthcare:

• Accessibility: patients should be able to fully use the functionality of a particular digital solution, regardless of their physical and mental disabilities.
• Conciseness: the user interface should not be overloaded – instead, it should demonstrate only those functions that the user currently needs.
• Mobility: users must be able to access at least some of the services provided by a particular healthcare organization remotely.
• Consistency: the functionality of a specific digital solution must be presented consistently and logically.
• Control: user actions within a specific digital solution must be controlled to prevent errors.
• Context: the interface of digital solutions must be context-sensitive so that users can intuitively perform targeted actions in it.

Best Practices in HealthTech UX Design

In this paragraph, we suggest that you consider a number of best practices that will help you bring HealthTech UX design to life.

Focus on the end user

Before you start working on a design, you will need to try to perceive it from the point of view of the end user to understand what possible problems they may encounter and what solutions will be optimal for them. Design thinking methods such as user research, as well as creating user personas and user flows based on surveys, personal data, etc., can help you with this.

Don't overload your screens

You should not place all the functions that have to be presented in your digital solution on the same screen. Instead, try to create a convenient, context-sensitive hierarchy and, according to it, divide the functionality into groups, placing each of them on a separate screen.

Create intuitive navigation

Your users must understand intuitively how to perform this or that action. Typically, the “rule of three” is used for this – that is, to complete a particular task, the user must complete no more than three steps. If this is not possible, make sure that your product contains clear and unambiguous hints leading to the goal.

Maintain balance

The visual component of your product also plays an important role: in particular, the user interface should look well-balanced, harmonious, and have a consistent style without being annoying.

Ensure compliance with data security standards and regulations

Make sure that while using your product, consumers cannot accidentally leak personal data (that is, every operation requiring their personal data must be performed by them consciously, after obtaining their consent). To do this, you will need to focus your design development process on FDA recommendations, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 62366.

Provide alternative control and navigation tools

Your users may have certain limitations in using the vast majority of digital solutions, so your main task will be to help them overcome them within your product. In particular, we are talking about ensuring product usability and accessibility by providing alternative navigation and control tools (for example, through voice input). More information on how to achieve accessibility in interaction design can be found in the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Consider implementing responsive design

If you consider launching your solution on multiple platforms (for example, on mobile and desktop devices), you will need to implement a responsive medical app design that will scale the screens of this solution to the dimensions and orientation of a specific user device.

Base on user feedback

As you complete the prototyping stage and/or launch new versions of your ready-made solution, you need to collect feedback from real users and optimize the UX design in accordance with their complaints, needs, goals, and wishes.

Challenges Of UX Design For HealthTech

Along with following the principles described above, you should also understand what challenges you will have to overcome during the UX design implementation.

Bringing complex workflows into the digital plane

Many workflows in the healthcare sector are multi-step and require the participation of multiple parties. In this regard, one of the most difficult tasks of UX designers is to transfer them to the digital plane, accompanied by simplification and reducing the risk of errors. As for overcoming this challenge, most often, teams have to start their work on a project by creating its tree-like architecture - this is the easiest way to remove unnecessary steps and correctly group functionality that requires the same actions on the part of the end user.

Ensuring regulatory compliance

When designing a user interface, designers must take into account standards that ensure the protection of private user data and prevent its abuse. The same applies to providing accessibility for solutions that patients with disabilities can use. After work on the project is completed, it will need to obtain a certificate of conformity from an independent authority authorized to issue such certificates.

Data visualization

If a particular digital solution operates on large volumes of data and generates analytical conclusions based on them, UX designers may well encounter difficulties in presenting them in a simple and understandable form for the end user. Usually, this problem is solved by testing several visualization options: charts, line graphs, pie charts, etc., and choosing the one that seemed most convenient for the vast majority of respondents.

Final Thoughts

We hope that now, you understand the differences between the process of developing a UX design for a medical sector and the usual one. That’s why it’s so important when looking for a UX design healthcare contractor to turn to specialists who already have experience creating digital products in this niche. In particular, you can contact us, and we will bring your idea to life in accordance with all standards and regulations accepted in your region.

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Single-page applications (SPAs) have earned a strong position in demand long ago. Such apps have one page where most information remains unchanged, and only its parts are updated when a user interacts with them. 

Maybe, you don’t know precisely what they are. However, you probably use them daily. Most social media, Gmail, and other programs are single-page apps. They are quickly adopted thanks to their fast load times and user-friendliness. 

As for React, it is quite a favored instrument for SPA web development. Programmers can build SPA’s components with React to ensure their scalability, reuse them with few configurations, and refresh them instantly without manually reloading a page. Besides, React solutions are optimized for SEO while delivering high flexibility thanks to the Virtual DOM. 

What Are React Single Page Applications (SPAs)? 

SPAs consist of one HTML page. To access it, you make a one-time connection and then – load and modify data without refreshing an entire page. Only the blocks engaged in the interaction process are updated while other page elements remain unaffected.

A clear illustration of a one-page application is Google Docs. While reading a text, you scroll through sheets, but the top row with the menu and the left panel with captions stay put. Whatever changes you make, certain things stay untouched.

React is very common for SPAs because of its convenience — it speeds up the programming process significantly. Also, note that it is not a framework, it’s a library. The main thing in it is the components as they represent particular items on a page. Each one of them contains the entire set of data and methods needed for work.

React allows you to save the state of the elements. This makes them isolated and self-contained. This feature, in turn, provides developers with the ability to reuse the elements as needed. Specifically, the same element can be applied to another page or parts of the website as many times as you want. This way, a developer doesn't need to re-write a significant part of the code. Therefore, the absence of complex dependencies between elements simplifies troubleshooting.

Pros of React SPAs

Why do giant companies like Meta choose React SPAs? It becomes clear after looking at its main advantages: 

• Versatility. SPAs can be used from any device that has access to the Internet. 
• Accessibility. There are no problems with сompatibility, as well as memory limitations, capacity, or installation time.
• Enhanced usability. These apps are straightforward and enjoyable to operate.
• Better responsiveness. It can be ensured thanks to the high speed of data load.
• Ability to process large volumes of data. The device's memory does not limit the processing power of an app and the volumes of data it operates.
• Code reuse. React allows developers to reuse parts of code as often as needed in the same app. 

Let's look closely at the main merits of React SPA development. 

Enhanced User Experience (UX)

The primary advantage of a single web page application is immediate data update, resulting in a smooth sensation from using and improved responsiveness. Since SPA doesn't have to implement full-page reloads during use, the contents of a page refresh very quickly. The program only needs to connect to the server at the start, and then simply loads the necessary segments as a visitor needs them. In a single-page app, everything works quickly after the first load and doesn’t keep users waiting. 

Improved Developer Efficiency

Programmers who use React receive a lot of tools that simplify the assembling of the single-page application architecture. Moreover, React allows reusing code in software architecture to speed up the work. For instance, if you decide later to evolve a one-page app into a full-featured multi-page application, you’ll be able to reuse about 30% of the code instead of writing everything from scratch. Plus, it will help your startup save time and reduce costs.

Rich Interactivity

React is a freely accessible framework library that has a JSX (JavaScript XML) compiler with a focus on the users’ comfort as it provides prompt rendering. Thus, by utilizing React, you can create a UI-centric product which is common to SPAs that should have fluid interfaces, rapidly responding to the actions of users.

Cons of React SPAs

Surely, React SPA development has its drawbacks. Otherwise, every app would be written using this framework. 

The most important cons of these apps are:

• Lack of SEO optimization. The whole point is in the structure of such applications, which consist of just one page.
• Longer initial loading time. Since all user-side data of the application must be loaded during initialization, this can cause unpleasant delays for users.
• The client-side routing challenges. React may not be the best choice for creating applications with complex business logic and data routing.

So, let’s check each of them in more detail.

SEO Challenges

Single-page applications are quite problematic to index because not much text can be recognized by search robots. At the same time, you can’t put all the keywords on one page because it will look weird and lead to spam problems. What's more, the page will have only one URL.

You can eliminate this issue by resorting to server-side rendering. It's a way to render a one-page application on the server side. The app is still one-paged, but the main work is done on the server. The application receives a finished page with the required SEO elements from the server immediately after its initialization. However, due to the complex introduction of this technique, the cost of SPA development might be higher.

Complexity for Large Applications

Managing complex states and data traffic can be a problem in large SPAs. That’s why using React SPAs relates mostly to projects with rather limited functionality. At the same time, if applied skillfully, this library can still be useful when creating large projects – evidence of this is the digital giants that actively use it in the development of their services and applications. 

Initial Load Time

With React’s ability to load all content during initialization, people can wait a lot when opening a SPA first (in comparison to other websites). However, after initial loading, all other data will be pulled up automatically, and there will be no issues with delays in provisioning page content. 

Code splitting solves the problem of slow app loading by reducing the volume of data sent on the first session. Rather than uploading the entire code at once, users do it only with the parts that they need right now. This, in turn, facilitates the coding procedure.

React SPAs vs Traditional Multi-Page Applications (MPAs)

These kinds of apps are paralleled and characterized as competitors. However, multi-page applications (MPAs) are unlikely to lose the race because each alternative works for certain products and commercial pursuits. 

Let's look at the core strengths of each application type:

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As you can see, each application type has its drawbacks and advantages. So, when choosing between them, come from the specifics and tasks of your company. 

What kind of companies should pay attention to one-page solutions?

• Products that run on a captivating platform with low data volumes. SPA is commonly applied to SaaS platforms, social media, and private communities. Some examples include Grammarly, Netflix, and Slack.
• Startups focused on usability. Single-page apps allow you to create an easy-to-use and intuitive interface that attracts the eye and encourages customers to explore the product. 
• Startups planning to go big. Later you can reuse some of the code of your single web page application. This helps reduce the time and expense involved in developing new, full-fledged digital solutions.
• Businesses for whom SEO is not a key metric. If your company doesn't require to be ranked high on Google from its first launch, to successfully implement your idea, SPA is right for you.
• Companies with their own APIs. You can build a one-page application based on a pre-built API.

Conclusion 

Today, we see that one-page applications gradually replace classic applications and begin to play an important role in the construction of large-scale web systems. Now, these apps are everywhere, and we use them every day without noticing it. Moreover, the big players in the app market already use SPAs.

What are the rewards of single-page applications? They are pretty speedy, don't keep visitors on hold, and generally improve their experience when dealing with the solution. in turn, overall consumer comfort has a direct impact on conversion rates and profits.

Still, SPAs are not ideal for all startups. But for those seeking a dynamic, high-speed, and lightweight digital solution, SPAs are an excellent choice.

Interesting fact: there are approximately 8,462 project management methodologies to choose from. Every project manager understands that selecting the right methodology is crucial to getting the job right.

So, how to understand which one is right for your project?

There are many various ways to deliver projects. Generally speaking, these ways are our project management models – applying different principles, themes, frameworks, processes and standards to help provide structure to the way we deliver projects.

Agile is one of the more recognizable project management methodologies. This methodology is best suited for projects that are iterative and incremental. It’s a type of process where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers.

Agile is a methodology that has methodologies within itself, such as Scrum and Kanban. Scrum methodology is one of the most popular and simple frameworks to put the principles of Agile into practice.

Let’s talk about the Scrum and how it works

Scrum is a subset of Agile. It is a framework for agile development that helps teams work together with the customers. Much like a sports team training for the big game, Scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and losses to continuously improve. Its goal is to develop, deliver, and sustain complex products through collaboration, accountability, and iterative progress. According to this, it is not surprising that Scrum is the most widely-used one among the teams.

Scrum team roles

• Product owner: The product owner represents stakeholders, which are typically customers.
• Development team: Group of professionals that consists of three to nine individuals who have the business, design, analytical and development skills to carry out the actual work, solve problems and produce deliverable products.
• Project manager: Manager who ensures the understanding and execution of Scrum is followed. The manager’s responsibilities include coaching and motivating the team, removing impediments during the development, and ensuring that the team has the best possible conditions to meet its goals and produce deliverable products.

Phases of Scrum Model

Now, let’s take a look at the main steps of the development process that Scrum consists of.

Step 1. Product Backlog Creation

A product backlog is a list that contains features to be implemented during the development process. It’s ordered by priority and every item is called a User story. A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user or customer. It helps development teams capture simplified, high-level descriptions of a user’s requirements written from that end user’s perspective. The examples below show how these stories can look like:

• As an internet banking customer, I want to see a rolling balance for my everyday accounts, so that I can keep track of my spending after each transaction is applied

• As a manager, I want to be able to understand my colleagues’ progress, so I can better report our success and failures.
• As a customer, I want to receive an SMS when the item arrives, so that I can go pick it up right away.
• As Max, I want to organize my work, so I can feel more in control.

This structure is not required, but it is helpful for defining done.“Why can’t we just write features or tasks instead?”

Step 2. Sprint Planning and Sprint Backlog Creation

The sprint duration is very important so that the user stories are as small as possible. The typical average sprint duration lasts about 2 weeks. If the sprint duration is small, then the advantage is that more customer feedback can be received and most of the errors and bugs can be addressed earlier. If the sprint duration is long, then it allows the developer to work thoroughly.

The next stage is to do the sprint backlog creation. It consists of user stories that will be completed during the current sprint. The scrum team must select the important user stories and make them into smaller tasks. They need to plan on how to get the task completed. The Scrum team should be capable of finishing all these stories on time. Also, one important thing is to prioritize the necessary tasks.

For example, the goal for Sprint: “A website visitor can order a product”. We discuss with the team and product owner how to implement this. Roughly, customers have to go through three steps to order something: 1) select a product, 2) enter address and billing information, 3) perform the payment. We discover several exception paths. After the discussion about what technology we will use for this goal and how the team will implement this functionality, we start creating the Sprint Backlog.

Below are some of the items that can end up on the Sprint Backlog:

• When an order is placed, send an email to the sales department;
• Allow customers to pay for their order by credit card;
• Encrypt user information in order (e.g. email, address);

Step 3: Working On Sprint and Scrum Meetings

The actual user stories are moved as small tasks in the sprint backlog, where the actual work starts. This is where the implementation of a software application, such as website development, begins.

To begin with, a task board is made with a lot of cards is used. The cards specify the details about the tasks such as assignee, work details, due date or the time duration, etc. The cards can be arranged according to their importance. When work on a task has been started, the corresponding sticker is moved from the “To do” field to the “In progress” one. When work is completed, the sticker can be moved to the “Testing” field, and after the task is successfully tested, the sticker goes to the “Done” field.

For this activity, we use specialized software JIRA and Trello for this task.

In this step the scrum meetings are important as it is done to track the progress status and who is doing what status. The burndown chart is the output of this meeting, as it provides the details about how many tasks are completed and if there are any issues or problems in completing the tasks in the “Work In Progress” columns.

It is also important to notice one more Scrum feature is Daily Scrum meetings. These meetings’ main purpose is to get full information about the current project status and make sure that all team members are on the same stage. During Scrum meetings, every single team member should tell what he has done for the day, which tasks will be the next, and what problems team members faced during the work.

Day by day Scrum meetings help increase the flexibility of the development process. They also allow understanding of what changes should be made.

Step 4. Testing, Product Increment and Sprint Review

The result of every sprint in Scrum is a potentially shippable product increment that can be presented to the customer. After each iteration, the development team creates a new version of a software product and adds new features with increased value. In the end part of every sprint, there is Sprint Review where the overall results can be demonstrated and analyzed. According to this info, the stakeholders can make a decision about further project changes and plan the next sprint.

Step 5. Retrospective and Next Sprint Planning

Retrospective’s main goal is to consider the results and the ways how to improve the development process on the next step. The team should talk about the lessons learned and the pitfalls that were during the development part. An important feature is to improve the work of the Scrum team as a whole. The team should conclude what went well during the working process and what can be done better during future iteration. When the ways of improvement are defined, the team can start and concentrate on the next sprint planning.

Project Closure

The project closure phase represents the final phase of the project management. Around this time, the final product is ready for delivery. Here, the main focus of the project manager and the team should be on product release and product delivery. In this stage, all the activities related to the project are wrapped up.

Once the product is handed to the customers, the documentation is finalized and the project is closed.

Conclusion

The main differential features of Scrum are flexibility and constant progress. It’s provided mostly by regular communication and close cooperation between the stakeholders at each step.

When the sprint is done, the customer can assess the working product functionality at the current iteration and make decisions about how the project should evolve during the next sprints.

Use Case: Web Development

Problem Statement: Important changes need to be implemented on an existing company website.

Scrum team roles:

1. Product Owner: Team Lead
2. Development Team: Developers
3. Scrum Master: Project Manager

Basic Flow of Events:

1. The website needs to be updated.

Using Scrum:

1. Product Owner creates a backlog, i.e. the prioritized changes to make.
2. The development team and the QA team is created.
3. Sprint of 7 days is decided.
4. Project manager is assigned to set up the meetings and help with issues.
5. Tasks are assigned to the team
6. A daily 15-minute Scrum is set up for holding team meetings
7. The website is updated each day with the work done
8. QA notifies issues on the same day
9. Each week, the Sprint Review meeting is held with the CEO for an update on progress

Scrum is best suited for projects that consist of teams of less than seven people who need a flexible approach to deliver a product or service.