mContacts by Measurecare
mContacts by Measurecare is a contact database resource for medical professionals across the vast field of healthcare. The app allows users to tap into a database of information including contact details, addresses and locations in order to more efficiently access the information they need to do their jobs and contact critical people along the patient care spectrum.
CHALLENGE
Our challenge was understanding the complex communication needs of physicians, clinicians, professionals and support staff who struggle connecting across multiple and varied teams, departments, hospital networks and beyond.
Additionally our team had limited knowledge of the problem space. User interviews were vastly important to improve our understanding as was our user journey exercise based around the lifespan of a patient’s scan.
Role: UX Designer
Timeline: 3 Weeks
Platform: iOS Mobile App
Team: Claudia Zacharias, Leslie Black, Brooks Clayton
Figma
APPROACH
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Competitive Analysis
Personas
Journey Mapping
Feature Prioritization
Usability Testing (2 Rounds)
iOS Mobile Mock Up Screens
PROCESS OVERVIEW
mContacts app helps users search for contacts and locations, pin favorites for easy future access and create groups for efficient multi-person communications.
Providing confidence that users’ critical communications can be delivered with the clarity of an in-person interaction and with urgency when the situation calls for it.
First let’s look at a high level overview of my team’s overall process. Later in this case study we’ll take a deeper dive into specific steps and findings during the research and design phases of the UX process we employed for our client.
This project began with a brief supplied by Measurcare. Measurecare is developing a product suite for the healthcare field and the brief discussed two products, mContacts and Peer Review. In discussing our three week timeline, narrowing in on scope and discovering the primary and secondary goals the client held for our partnership we honed in on mContacts as the main deliverable. Along with the app we also built out a supporting user interface for the desktop version of mContacts to reflect the new app design solution.
HYPOTHESIS & ASSUMPTIONS
We hypothesized that medical professionals and support staff need to connect across multiple and varied teams, departments, hospital networks and beyond in order to communicate across the full spectrum of healthcare workers involved in patient care, clinical work and more.
Barriers to efficient communication exist due to access, availability and gatekeepers that can halt or delay the flow of communication, sometimes resulting in negative repercussions to patient care.
PROBLEM SPACE
As the process developed we realized that we were facing a vast, complex, varied and disparate set of not only contacts but locations, hospital systems and provider networks.
The scope was always a challenge but our biggest obstacle was determining how to provide a scaleable search/filter solution to our client that had the flexibility and depth to grow with their database but was also easy for users to understand and navigate.
As our understanding deepened we set out to determine the following:
How might we provide users within the medical profession a way to have access to each other that allows for system wide communication?
THE RESEARCH
Research informs all of our decisions as UX designers. Our team began with business research including a business model canvas, competitive brand matrix and finally a competitive feature analysis.
BUSINESS RESEARCH & COMPETITIVE SPACE
Competitive analysis and a business model matrix were the main business research tools employed by our team. These tools allowed us to ascertain what other companies and products existed within the same or comparable product space. We then looked at four of these identified competitors and analyzed the communication tools they were offering in the healthcare space. This approach helped us to clearly identify where mContacts was falling short. Conversely, it also identified if they were excelling in an area that we could leverage.
Competitive Matrix
USER INTERVIEWS
Initially our team was provided with a list of current users by Measurecare. We secured three interviewees, two radiologists and one senior administrator. This was a great jumping off point but we quickly realized that their client base was restricted and sourced from one group of radiologists from their one primary client.
For the sake of a more substantive and diverse user set our team secured three additional non-users within the medical field to expand out interviewee pool. This added two registered nurses and one surgical physician to our interviewees.
User interviews were crucial in helping our team understand the problem space and more importantly the user.
DATA SYNTHESIS
To establish patterns and themes from our interviews we created an affinity map and discovered major themes regarding needs around clear, quick communications and access to contact information, conveying urgency, saving items for follow up, group communications and access.
The patterns and themes we discovered across those interviews then informed the development of our personas.
Persona’s capture characteristics that represent the most common traits, goals, needs and frustrations discovered in our user interviews and through affinity mapping. We developed two personas one radiologist and an oncologist.
JOURNEY MAP
Journey mapping was truly critical for our understanding of our users and the problem space. In this case study our journey map is undertaken by a scan and is accompanied by the emotional experience, pain points and opportunities discovered during the journey from start to finish as the scan changes hands.
Rather than the journey one user would take we instead looked at the journey a scan might take across the spectrum of care.
Journey Map of a Scan
We assessed pain points in the life of a scan as it changes hands from an OB/GYN, to a mammographer, radiologist, ultrasound technician and oncologist.
We discovered opportunities to improve user experience in three key areas:
Quick searches to easily find direct contact information
Sending messages (either audio or text) with an indication that an urgent response is needed
Offering expansive contact search functionality for specialty, organization, zip codes and more.
THE DESIGN
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
Our wireframe designs developed from two methods of feature prioritization (MoSCoW and Feature Prioritization matrix) to establish our MVP, or minimum viable product.
Afterward our team completed a design studio, an exercise designed to hone in on the best design solutions through group ideation. As a team we began our wireframes with a shared vision, unified goals and expectations. Below you can directly map what we discovered to what it inspired.
DESIGN STUDIO
We followed feature prioritization with a design studio. Design studio is a tool we use to quickly ideate the main screens of the product interface. We focus on features and placement and taking the best ideas from each sketch round, stealing from each other and scrapping what doesn’t work. This helped us move forward with a clear cohesive vision and a unified consensus on how to start our design process with mid fidelity screens in Figma.
MEDIUM FIDELITY, MOCKUPS & TESTING
Within Figma we created medium fidelity wire frames, a grayscale, image-less, pared down representation of the user interface. We then user tested this design with five individuals, measuring user successes and failures around a series of tasks, designed to determine their path to access key features.
We developed tests around our primary features including filtering and searching, pinning, messaging, accessing schedules and finally creating groups.
We identified some minor areas for improvement across all tasks except task one for filtering and searching. The task was to source a list of contacts who were both Radiologists and who worked at Mount Sinai. This task continued to be a challenge in mock up testing and will be a targeted next step recommendation in the conclusion section of this case study.
The evolution of the home screen: wireframes, mock up and ultimately the entirely re-imagined layout…providing an optimal user interface for users.
Home screen evolution for mContacts
MOCKUPS & TESTING
We used the insights from user testing round one to inform changes made as we adapted mid fidelity to a full color mock up design. We then ran a second round of user testing, based on the same tasks, to determining if the layout/ui changes we made improved, negatively impacted or had little to no effect on the success or failure of the user path to completion.
Round two testing identified a similar failure rate in the task surrounding filtering and searching while the other four tasks continued to perform largely the same and in a continued successful manner. This is the reason for the third home screen iteration seen above.
CONCLUSION
As mentioned previously our team had to address the continued relative failure around users’ attempts to filter into two categories. Ultimately we realized that traditional side bar filter options weren’t going to be adequate. The extensiveness and complexity of mContacts filtering needs, which we had identified from the start and our users confirmed was a challenge we needed to attempt to solve for our client.
After researching a number of robust filter UI’s, sketching, and team ideation we designed a re-imagined home page. We’re confident about the final redesign, which incorporates the filter feature within the home screen, allowing for a clean design with maximum functionality.
This filtering ui will support the expansive nature of the healthcare field in which mContacts will be utilized and support for any scaling and growth Measurecare will achieve as they build their client database.
The revised ui of the home screen design needs two full rounds of usability testing to determine if the new solution solves for the poor success rate of the first two iterations.
Our team is confident that the usability of search and filter will improve with the reimagined ui for the home screen addressing the subpar ease of use rating we received from our users during the first and second iterations.
After the second round of user testing we provided the client with our recommendations for next steps as well as providing them with user interface design templates for the desktop version of the mContacts product.
These were laid out and designed based on our mock up iOS prototype’s design system. We recommend building and testing these desktop screens for data on the user experience across that medium.
Final client deliverables included:
20 minute presentation on our findings and results
Comprehensive project report with deep-dive information regarding all aspects of the process, from research to design
Spec document to guide their developers in implementation of the new design system
Recommendations for next steps in the iterative process
Final Figma files and Zeplin files