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University and Clinic Internship Agreement




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.

  1. Meet for brief

    1. Designer to conduct any additional research for clarity with external or internal users

    2. Designer to request KPIs or business perspective if not given

    3. Personas and other artifacts, if required

    4. Conduct Competitive Analysis where appropriate

  2. Provide User Flows

    1. Meet with PM, UI, and backend to brainstorm ideas

  3. Meet with team to verify limitations/solutions together

    1. Designer to meet with engineering team and PM to discuss requirements and gain technical perspective, even brainstorm on solutions

    2. After user flows are agreed upon, the designer to give UX estimation time frame (this should include user feedback)

  4. Provide rough mocks

    1. Meet with UX team to get feedback on initial designs - to validate any patterns, ensure consistency, share and get feedback

    2. Can even get some initial feedback from internal users to just double-check and see if there are any other requirements missing

    3. If new requirements arise, note them in the ticket but let PM decide on validity and what phase to add the new feature in

    4. Mocks should be in InVision or prototype form

    5. Can meet with UI team to get feedback or inputs - feasibility check

  5. Involve the Tech Writing team in copy requests

    1. Mocks should be in a solid-state

    2. Create a ticket and meet with the TW lead to give context

  6. Get user feedback

    1. Meet with external, internal users, and PM to get feedback

    2. 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

    3. Can you provide a word or excel doc of feedback, if this is a big project

  7. Finalize designs

    1. Revise any designs from feedback received

    2. Finalize copy with TW team

    3. Meet with UI team to discuss new components needed

  8. Handoff to dev with functional requirements

    1. Meet with PM, UI, and Backend to go through designs, make sure nothing is missing and all states are thought through – Ex: Error states

    2. Be sure to provide functional requirements for developers – within the ticket, in InVision/ Marvel notes, or in word doc

    3. List out the Usability Success Criteria with PM in the ticket

  9. Design QA

    1. Request UX QA ticket and a CI environment to test designs

    2. During QA, test with users and get feedback early on

    3. Share feedback with PM and work with them to see what is in scope to fix or add to the next phase

  10. Measure the success of the product

    1. Tag items to track

    2. Create a (ticket?) to track the success of the feature and share it with teams

    3. List areas doing well, and areas where it can be improved

  11. Continue to get user feedback

    1. Attend training sessions

    2. Be proactive and get feedback from users after the feature is released

    3. 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

  1. Complex and extensive application form

  2. Information was not accessible at a single location

  3. Workflow customisation not provided

  4. Complex action centre/notification management

For Clinics

  1. Higher rates of confusion owing to inconsistent information provided

  2. Simplifying the offering availability workflow

  3. 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.



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