UX Research | Customer Insights | Strategy
Redesigning a critical payer web app
I was part of a small group assigned with redesigning an internal application for a large healthcare company. The application is used by clinicians to directly manage specific elements of patient care and had significant performance and user experience limitations. As the UX Researcher on the team, I delved into the current user experience of the application, relayed insights to stakeholders, and helped to ideate on a solution for the application. I worked closely with a UX Designer, Project Manager, Delivery Partner, and Lead Software Engineer on this project.
My role: UX Researcher
Tasks: Lean research plans, In-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, quantitative surveys, data synthesis and analysis
Note: This project is under a NDA and, as such, I will be discussing high level details that do not disclose the client’s identity or products.
Power in Numbers
3
Types of Research
5
User Issues Resolved
>200
Users Affected
Case Study
In order to better understand the project and problem at hand, the team planned a series of stakeholder interviews, product demos, and application analytics reviews.
However, we quickly ran into complications accessing the product demo and analytics review prior to our onsite project kickoff. This was especially problematic for maintaining the fidelity and timeliness of the research plan. In order to mitigate this issue, I set aside extra time at the beginning of the onsite activities to access the application, interview stakeholders, and update research protocols based on findings.
After speaking with stakeholders, I better understood their perception of the problem; however, it was time to see if it accurately reflected the users' experiences.
I conducted 1:1 onsite interviews and observation sessions across all user types. Almost all employees described feeling frustrated, unproductive, and tired of managing the application’s limitations. In fact, it appeared to not only affect the users’ ability to provide patient care in a productive way but it was a major detractor from the employees’ satisfaction with their jobs. It was clear that something needed to be fixed. Perhaps the most startling interview moment was that of a high-level employee who simply stated “I don’t know how much longer I can do this” and compared her experience to working on an assembly line with product backing up as she struggles to complete her tasks.
The results of the ethnographic observations were particularly eye-opening.
We uncovered significant limitations with the application, as well as innumerable employee “workarounds” that added significantly to workloads and put patient data at risk. Somehow, the stakeholders' impression of the application's design problems wildly underestimated the negative impact the application had on its users. I synthesized and analyzed the qualitative research to share with stakeholders and the rest of the project team, taking care to create a holistic and realistic vision of the users' day-to-day reality using this application. Research results were visualized with user personas, media clips, and user flows.
We encapsulated user's frustrations through quotes, media clips, persona development, and user flows.
Early concept surveys helped to validate design direction while follow-up interviews generated more detailed insights as we iterated on those redesign concepts.
Validative design research, accomplished remotely through a combination of surveys and in-depth interviews, validated our point by indicating that the application redesign was preferred by the majority of users sampled and that the users believed the redesign solved 5 out of 6 of their highest priority pain points.
At the outset, this project appeared to be a simple redesign of a straightforward, internal application for a large healthcare company. Exploratory user research, however, indicated that the problem at hand was far more complicated than previously thought. User research thus proved instrumental in helping to solve the complex nature of the problem at hand and in helping to provide evidence of this problem to stakeholders. Our client needed to see the reality of the inefficient application and users' countless 'workarounds' that were leading to lower productivity and higher burnout rate for employees.
I worked closely with our UX Designer and Dev Lead to translate research insights into concepts for the app revision via whiteboarding sessions.
Multimedia content made the users' day to day experience real for C-suite executives.
Telling a compelling story was important for the C-suite stakeholders who don't often get a chance to observe the intricacies of their employees' daily experiences. When reporting research results for this project, the inclusion of multimedia evidence and context (like observational videos, images, and audio) helped stakeholders to internalize the insights.
The lesson? Never underestimate the value of observing users in their natural environment.
This project represented a pivotal learning in my career as a UX Researcher- when carried out thoughtfully, observations of users in their natural environments will always prove an invaluable source of information. In this case, if we had not conducted observations, we likely would not have discovered the many 'workarounds' that employees were using to supplement the application's missing functionality. This discovery was central to our understanding of the scope of the user's problems with the application and to our success in solving the majority of user pain points with the redesign.