Which Interface Design Solutions Should You Consider for Your Medical App?

The number of healthcare apps is constantly rising. According to Statista, the App Store and Google Play have around 100,000 healthcare and medical apps (50,000 each). If you want to make your app accessible to the users and stand out among competitors, you have to ensure a good UI.

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User Interfaces aren’t only about looks. The app interface shapes the User Experience, determines how the user interacts with the app, and helps them to navigate and accomplish their goals. In this article, we share tips and tricks to bring top-quality interface design for such products.

Healthcare App UI Design Tips

When designing a healthcare app, the main focus should be making it accessible to every user. A significant part of the user base can be people with disabilities like:

• Physical. Visual or hearing impairments, difficulties with fine motor skills, and limited dexterity. Users with vision impairments can use screen readers, magnifiers, or audio alerts. Others with hearing difficulties may need flashing lights or captions.
• Cognitive. Learning disabilities, memory issues, or cognitive decline. This means there is absolutely no need to overcomplicate the service.
• Different levels of computer literacy. Older people often experience difficulties when using a digital service.

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When choosing colours, fonts, text, and buttons, strive to make the app accessible to all ages and user categories by checking the colour contrast, the attention areas, the size of the font, and the quality of the pictures.

Pick the Right Colour Palette

The colour palette is an important aspect of designing a healthcare app. Of course, it has an emotional impact on the users, but it also helps to establish the visual hierarchy by highlighting some actions and sections, reflects the company’s branding, and improves the app accessibility. Colour contrast is the most crucial aspect of a colour palette.

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The common choice of colours for a healthcare app is cold tones. They seem to be calm and relaxing. However, people from different cultures perceive colours differently, so it’s always a good idea to check colour psychology and prioritise the culture of the target audience.

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Blue

It is a well-known fact that different colours have different psychological impacts on us and can cause different emotions. For example, blue is often associated with calmness, focus, trust, and professionalism. And since these things are valued the most in the medical industry, it’s a go-to choice for lots of apps and services.

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Blue is a popular colour in many industries, but consumers automatically associate it with the medical field. It goes for everything and not just in the digital — the doctor in your clinic will most likely wear blue or white scrubs.

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Here are a few examples of such apps:

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As you can see, they look pretty similar, although all distinctive as healthcare apps. That’s the main risk of using the blue colour — you might be easily associated with somebody else in the field. This doesn’t mean you can’t use blue at all – just make sure to add other colours as well, or at least some bright accents to stand out in the crowd of similar-coloured apps.

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White

Another popular colour for medical apps is white. It is often associated with cleanliness and simplicity. However, for some users, plain and bright white colours may look a bit clinical or sterile. This can cause some subconscious fear, similar to what many feel in the doctor’s office. Plus, using white alone may work badly for accessibility — for example, users with visual impairments might find it difficult to navigate the app.  

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However, you can go with ivory, grey, snow, beige, and sea sand — the list is endless. To make this subtle interface more accessible and user-friendly, you can always add some bright and contrasting elements.

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Like here, in these two apps. You can see that the background seems white. But if you look closely, it’s a grey colour with bright contrast elements.

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Black

Although black is not the most popular colour in the medical industry, it is also used in some cases. It symbolises trust, authority, and sophistication, which are the feelings you want your app to convey. Except for its psychological effect, the black colour has other advantages. It is readable and can easily be seen against light or colour-rich backgrounds. With the rising popularity of a dark mode in app design, black or dark backgrounds are being used more frequently even during the day.

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One can also create a visual typography hierarchy using black in fonts or buttons. Overusing it may result in anxiety, so it can be paired with other calming colours, such as blue or green.

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In the Apple Fitness app, black is the main interface colour. Thanks to the use of multiple bright elements, it’s still highly readable. As it’s an app mostly for running and training in the gym, it provides for better visibility in the sun. However, it can only be used by its target audience — young people who work out often, as it doesn’t look very accessible for older people.

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Green

Green colour can also be used for healthcare apps as it gives a sense of calmness and relaxation. It has a strong natural connotation, which is often seen in environmental projects and herbal medicine. If your app is more on this side, you can use beautiful shades of green to relax the user. However, if you don’t want to be associated with natural treatments, avoid using too much of this colour.

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Like in this app — you wouldn't guess at first glance that it helps to fight diabetes.

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It can be utilised as an effective colour to highlight some elements or actions. For example, green and red colours are often used to design buttons for Yes/No choices. Or it can bring good news about the test results or successfully submitted documents.

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Here’s a good example of using green colour to show some achievement:

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Red

The red colour is rarely used for things like background or app screens. As it is really intense and has low contrast, it’s not the most visual-friendly colour. However, it is often utilised for specific elements like buttons or notifications to convey a sense of urgency and alarm the user. It can also be associated with danger; that’s why it is effective in cases when you need to attract users' attention to an important message or warning.

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The red colour is indispensable when you need to help highlight some key information, but only if it’s one of the brand colours. Otherwise red shouldn’t be used in navigation as it will be understood like an error message. As it’s the first thing your eyes go to when looking at the screen, it can be helpful to urge medical providers or users to take a certain quick action, like submitting the documents for critical verification or checking lab tests errors, etc.

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Like in the following screens, red colour is used to signify action or show a possibly dangerous heart rate zone.

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Pink

Pink is the first colour that comes to mind when you think about apps for women's health and pregnancy, like gynaecological or paediatric services. As it is stereotypically associated with the female sex, using it extensively in other types of healthcare apps may seem a bit confusing. That’s why we don’t recommend it as the main colour for your app if you work in a different service field.

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Here are examples of pink in apps. It looks nice and relaxing but is already hugely associated with women’s health.

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However, using this colour to highlight some elements or important information can be beneficial as it seems to convey a sense of relaxation and fun. But it’s always better to opt for pastel shades, like the one on the screen below, since a lot of people have a distaste for a bright pink colour.

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Make Every Button Visible

Buttons are a very important element in UI design. They can signify an important action like purchase confirmation, submitting forms, etc. That’s why it’s vital to make them visible — users can get frustrated if they cannot find the form or the button right away. And unless they have a very strong motivation to keep looking for that button, they might easily leave the app and never come back.

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Making buttons visible is also a great point for accessibility. Users with visual impairments may struggle to find the button coloured in a similar shade to the background. It is also important to pay attention to the text you put on the button. For the same reason, the text should be logical and as descriptive as possible. It is considered a bad UX if a button just says something like “Press here” when it can say “Go back to the Main Page.”

Use Legible Fonts

Users of any healthcare app should be able to quickly and accurately read all the information presented. It could be an important notice of taking pills or calling the doctor, and if the fonts are all scribbled and ornate, they will make this task difficult. That’s why when choosing the font, you always have to keep in mind legibility. Accessibility-wise, some users with cognitive impairments or older people won’t be able to quickly read the information.

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You also would want to choose a font that conveys trustworthiness and professionalism, and is appropriate for the app that deals with sensitive medical information. It’s not the best idea to use playful fonts like the ones from the Maka or View family.

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Sans Serif fonts are one of the best fonts for healthcare applications. They are simple, easy to read, and yet have a modern look. They will give your app a professional look and will fit any type of information. A few popular sans-serif fonts include Inter, Helvetica, Arial, Roboto, Futura, etc.

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Other important aspects of fonts are kerning and leading — the distance between the two characters and the space between adjacent lines of type, respectively. If it is too small or too large, the text loses readability and becomes difficult to recognize. This greatly depends on the UI of the app; it’s always better to personalise your configurations according to it.  

Select Intuitively Understandable Icons and Images

Icons and images are used in most apps to make the interface more concise, understandable, and also fun. Icon elements replace text (or go together with text) to signify some app section. In a healthcare application, such sections can be a personal account, lab tests, doctor appointments, etc. They can also show some facts and actions schematically. There are a lot of intuitively understandable icons and stickers that can be found on platforms like Flaticon:

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The important thing about these icons is that they are supposed to add some real value and don’t confuse the users. There’s no point in adding basic pictures and icons from free stocks like smiling doctors and patients, since they don’t add value or meaning to the interface. However, a designer or an illustrator can draw the icons and stickers to add to the app. They can be fun and recognizable, promote your brand by using specific colours, and make you stand out among your competitors.

Healthcare App Design Checklist

Checklists are a great tool to highlight certain things and ultimately achieve great results. You can use the following checklist when designing a healthcare app:

1. Choose the colour scheme for the app considering their psychological effect and stick to it.
2. Add contrast and highlight the important elements with colours other than those used for the background.
3. Pick suitable and readable fonts.
4. Plan structure of your app: screens, sections, menus, tabs.
5. Create an app layout starting from the Home page.
6. Add visible buttons in the right places.
7. Use stickers and icons to avoid an abundance of text content.
8. Remember about accessibility — put yourself in the user’s shoes and experience the Customer Journey yourself.

UI Design as Never-Ending Process

UI design is a never-ending process of improving the user experience and meeting their needs. That's why it’s so important to keep your hand on the pulse, gather feedback, and study different cases and consumer behaviour. If you don’t know where to start designing your healthcare app — use the checklist to determine some milestones for your product. And if you ever need any help, you can always talk to our designers - with deep expertise in healthcare apps we can advise or even work on designs for you.

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