Role
User Researcher, Product Designer
Users
University coordinator, Clinic supervisors
Time taken
6 weeks ,
Tools
Figma, Miro
Universities that offer allied healthcare program requires a set of courses that a student is expected to complete in a clinical environment before they graduate.
Every year, Universities request clinics to provide internships to the students so that they can be mentored, assessed, and receive credits for their semester. The duration of students being in the clinic depends on the clinic's availability for the whole year. Universities have the responsibility to ensure that all the students are placed in a clinic.
The major gap is in the communication process between the clinic and university which was the prime focus of this project.
Understanding the process
Challenges
Back and forth communication with clinics with regards to offering availability depending on their schedule, syncing Clinics' latest details with the University database
Clinic's potential error while offering availability to different universities
Cumbersome number of steps to provide the availability to university
A supervisor works with multiple clinics and availability request becomes tedious for a university coordinator
Design process
Focused on improving the usability, accessibility, and delight provided in the product interaction. Keeping the user in the centre of the creative process leads us to create designs that are clutter-free, easy, intuitive, scalable, engaging, and provide a fabulous experience to the users.
Meet for brief
Designer to conduct any additional research for clarity with external or internal users
Designer to request KPIs or business perspective if not given
Personas and other artifacts, if required
Conduct Competitive Analysis where appropriate
Provide User Flows
Meet with PM, UI, and backend to brainstorm ideas
Meet with team to verify limitations/solutions together
Designer to meet with engineering team and PM to discuss requirements and gain technical perspective, even brainstorm on solutions
After user flows are agreed upon, the designer to give UX estimation time frame (this should include user feedback)
Provide rough mocks
Meet with UX team to get feedback on initial designs - to validate any patterns, ensure consistency, share and get feedback
Can even get some initial feedback from internal users to just double-check and see if there are any other requirements missing
If new requirements arise, note them in the ticket but let PM decide on validity and what phase to add the new feature in
Mocks should be in InVision or prototype form
Can meet with UI team to get feedback or inputs - feasibility check
Involve the Tech Writing team in copy requests
Mocks should be in a solid-state
Create a ticket and meet with the TW lead to give context
Get user feedback
Meet with external, internal users, and PM to get feedback
Make sure to do this step, it not only socializes that something new is coming but gives internal users a say in what they want to see
Can you provide a word or excel doc of feedback, if this is a big project
Finalize designs
Revise any designs from feedback received
Finalize copy with TW team
Meet with UI team to discuss new components needed
Handoff to dev with functional requirements
Meet with PM, UI, and Backend to go through designs, make sure nothing is missing and all states are thought through – Ex: Error states
Be sure to provide functional requirements for developers – within the ticket, in InVision/ Marvel notes, or in word doc
List out the Usability Success Criteria with PM in the ticket
Design QA
Request UX QA ticket and a CI environment to test designs
During QA, test with users and get feedback early on
Share feedback with PM and work with them to see what is in scope to fix or add to the next phase
Measure the success of the product
Tag items to track
Create a (ticket?) to track the success of the feature and share it with teams
List areas doing well, and areas where it can be improved
Continue to get user feedback
Attend training sessions
Be proactive and get feedback from users after the feature is released
Conduct Observational / User testing
User analysis
In this case, the users are University coordinators and Clinic's supervisor. The software company considered employees who have worked in these professions and represents CSR (Customer success representative). Therefore, gender, and location won't be based on any of these constraints.
Focus group
Methods used to get a better understanding of the user on how the user was using the current system, how was their work about, and what are their daily tasks and procedures along with pain points. There were 6 people from different locations were tested. I participated as a facilitator as well as an observer.
Affinity diagram
We could find three areas to work on related to user experience, problems they face in the current process, and finally the new features.
Guerrilla research
5 users were part of this test and similar questions from the test before mentioned were made. Now we could focus on how they request and respond to availability requests as University coordinators as well as Clinic supervisors individually and per discipline, questions were made in a slightly different way to discover the most used flows and how they were reaching the results they needed.
Key findings
For University
Complex and extensive application form
Information was not accessible at a single location
Workflow customisation not provided
Complex action centre/notification management
For Clinics
Higher rates of confusion owing to inconsistent information provided
Simplifying the offering availability workflow
Sourcing correct information and reducing the time taken to complete the process
Ideation and brainstorming
A viable direction was to split the workflow into two - one page for the university coordinator and another for the Clinics.
With the University coordinator choosing different types of workflow options, the coordinator receives more flexibility and efficiency in operation.
The clinics aren’t intimidated by the simplified application, thus giving responses that are more accurate, and saving the clinic's time and efforts as well.
Proposed workflow
We brainstormed and picked specific areas for enhancements considering the top challenges and focus areas in mind to develop the proposed features for the University coordinator and Clinics.
Prototype
Transforming the wireframes and prototypes to actual images with themes, components, and styles applied to them.
University coordinator's web app
Highlights
1. List view
Allowing coordinators to manage their different communications with clinics
2. Go to action in one place
Navigating to action has become easier
1. Workflow-based navigation
Guided walkthrough of controls and features for the user to discover, making it less overwhelming for coordinators.
2. Add-on activities
Coordinators can decide whether they want the clinics to do more than one type of activity.
1. Task-based navigation
Allows the coordinator to keep a track of activities that are expected to be processed.
2. Advanced configuration
Allows the coordinator to fill in the details, pick the templates and decide their university contacts
Recipients selection allows the university to decide whether they want all the clinics or a supervisor who is working with multiple clinics. Coordinators can also see and decide to add/remove certain supervisors from a clinic while sending an email.
Send emails to give a summary of the recipients and add-on activity as a part of the workflow.
Once the emails are sent, a summary is shown which gives the status of the email delivery, bounced emails, and configuration setup details.
Clinic's offering availability
Highlights
Clinics receive university instructions and documents to refer to before the supervisor proceeds with offering availability.
1. Clinic's supervisor schedule
Since the clinic supervisor works with one or more locations, therefore, per clinic or university asks for their schedule.
2. Clinics providing availability
University calendars are shared with the clinic supervisors so that they are able to accommodate students.
The clinic supervisor selects the different supervisors who would be mentoring the students along with certain additional information which helps the university towards preparedness for the student's internship.
3. Help
In case the clinics require to connect with the university's coordinator, a dedicated panel is provided where the point of contact along with any resourceful documents are provided to the clinics.
After confirming their decision on availability, the supervisor clicks on the Submit button.
Conclusion
With the University coordinator web application, we had to work towards creating a tool that let them gain some much-deserved control. By immersing ourselves in understanding the crucial role they play in the workflow, we were able to come up with a digital solution that gave them exactly what they needed to do their best work.
Working on the Clinic's offering availability web app opened up creative avenues like never before. The challenge here was to scale the technology to the level of those who weren’t too familiar with it and pack in as much power by way of safeguards, along with ease of access and visuals.
This experience was a series of contrasts that allowed us to stretch our capabilities to accommodate these vastly varying user needs. It only goes to highlight the power of user-centric thinking which enables us, designers, to come up with the right solution.
