Stroll Health: uX Redesign

Stroll Health is a startup working to increase transparency in healthcare, so that doctors and patients might make better value decisions. Currently, the company is focused on building out their referral management application - enabling doctors to match patients with flexible, timely, and low cost imaging services.

challenge

The leadership team came to us with a broad request to optimize the user experience on their search results page, a few hypotheses around how to improve the overall navigation and information displayed on the page, and one open question which I'll rephrase here as:

How might we help users find an imaging facility that best matches their needs?

Role

I led a team of five through each stage of the design process from research and problem definition to high fidelity validation over the course of eight weeks, after which we presented a final prototype to Stroll Health for implementation over the summer of 2017.

results

With the changes we made to the search results page, we successfully moved forward metrics that were important to the Stroll Health team and experiences important to their users. 

Before we dig into the details, here's a snapshot of our before and after:

And Here's how we got there:

Process

[insert graphic]

I intentionally front-loaded the team's hours, ensuring we would have a significant chunk of time for research and product definition, which I also like to think of as problem definition, because so often, I've seen teams jump too quickly into building solutions. I wanted to make sure we all knew what we were trying to solve so we could stay focused on that during our eight week timeline.

Research

Healthcare is a complex industry, to say the least. So that we could better understand the landscape in which we were operating, I decided to kick off the research phase with a simple group exercise: write down all of our questions about healthcare and the Stroll Health platform. These questions included everything from “what does imaging mean?” to “what factors into a doctor’s decision to refer a patient to a specific facility?” to “how does Stroll Health get their facility and appointment data?”

We then sorted all our questions into three buckets:

• Google It
• Ask Stroll Health 
• User Research

As you might guess, the last bucket of questions fueled our user interviews and usability testing, which we delved into next. 

The aim was to conduct usability tests with physicians, but we were flexible with this requirement since physicians are extremely busy and we could surface the most pressing usability issues with other individuals as well. 

Overall, we conducted five usability tests: 3/5 were physicians, and 2/5 were individuals generally working in healthcare.

Product Definition

In my opinion, this is the most difficult yet most crucial part of the design process. During this phase, we identified the major pain points to address in our redesign and our primary persona. 

Together, we reviewed and prioritized our usability test findings using a 2x2 matrix, eventually sorting them into three categories of repeating issues and user feedback:

• Map Interaction: Disorienting, generally ignored, and unclear relationship between facility information and map movement. 
• Appointment Selection: Confusing copy, several clicks needed to navigate to specific date and time, frustrating to skim through facility options.
• Facility Information: Photos look "sketchy" and unprofessional, unclear value add. 

[insert persona images]

At this point, we were ready to begin a design studio as a bridge between the product definition and lo-fi prototyping phases. The central question for our design studio was "how might we help users find an imaging facility that best matches their needs?" However, we went through three rounds of the process, each focusing on one of the pain point categories we had identified above. 

After each timed brainstorm, during which we quickly sketched out our ideas without constraint, we put them up on the wall and talked through them, refraining from critique until all three rounds were complete in order to keep our creativity flowing. 

[insert image of design studio]

Lo-Fi Prototyping and validation

Armed with our best ideas and creative energy from design studio, we moved into lo-fi prototyping. With five designers on board, I decided that the most productive way to split up the work was by "component" and we would check in via daily stand-ups to ensure that our designs were developing compatibly. They key components we defined for improvement were:

• Sorting and Filtering
• Map
• Facility Information
• Date and Time View / Selection 

Each designer took on one of these components, and I took on the task of bringing all the components together into one cohesive prototype. To be honest, it took a lot of willpower to refrain from making significant changes to specific components before design critique, but at the end of the day it was worth it to get unfiltered feedback from people who could bring fresh eyes to the project. 

[insert image of lo-fi prototype]

During design critique, it became clear that as a team, there was a lack of understanding in terms of the context in which users were coming to the search results page, and what was happening behind the scenes when making a patient referral. This was definitely impacting our ability to design effective solutions. To help relieve some confusion, we mapped out the current task flow of the patient referral process. 

[insert task flow image]

This helped immensely and was a breakthrough moment for our team, providing valuable clarity on how to move forward. We went back to create a second version of our lo-fi prototype. 

[insert image of lo-fi prototype]

During this period, I also arranged for our team to meet at the Stroll Health offices to go over our progress to date with their leadership team, and ensure we were on the right track and meeting their expectations. This meeting ended up being helpful in an additional unexpected way, as we were able to learn more about the company's overall product roadmap which allowed us better understand where our work fit in and drove home the importance of resolving the pain points we had identified early on.

We came back from the meeting energized and ready to jump into lo-fi validation! We went through a round of comprehension and usability tests with five participants unfamiliar with the Stroll Health platform. 

Takeaways:

• x
• y
• x

Hi-Fi Prototyping and Validation

Armed with those takeaways, we were ready to begin the final stage of the design process - hi-fi prototyping and validation. There was a split in opinion that we needed to resolve - namely, the design for navigating through different days and weeks. We had come up with two design solutions, each with assumed pros and cons:

[insert three-day view vs week view]

In order to pick a path, we conducted a timed test to see how long it took users to navigate the page using one design versus the other - and the winner was... the week view. Users were able to navigate the page more quickly, cutting the time it took by a whopping 61%. This one decision impacted the design of other components including the facility information card, and how appointment times appeared. 

We also worked to create and apply a style guide and important documents for handoff including a component inventory and list of important interactions and edge cases. I specifically focused on creating the latter two documents, in addition to reviewing and rewriting page copy, and designing the week view scroll component we had agreed on. 

[insert hi-fidelity screens and call out changes]

conclusion

There are many learnings I've taken away from the experience of leading this UX redesign for Stroll Health. Perhaps most importantly, I learned a great deal about myself and my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to both managing and being an individual contributor. 

My organization skills were a boon for this project as I worked to ensure effective collaboration across designers working on separate components that needed to eventually come together. In addition, my bias for the research and problem definition phases of the design process were a great fit for this particular challenge, given the complexity of the healthcare sector. I loved the learning curve involved - translating the jargon, getting to know "new" users, mapping out existing processes, generally exploring an expansive new context. 

However, I also discovered in myself some impatience and a tendency to want to take over when things weren't moving as quickly or seamlessly as I had envisioned. Throughout the eight weeks on this project, I worked on reining in this tendency and instead viewing success in my role as helping others work through challenges, whether that meant asking questions about design decisions, serving as a sounding board, or providing clarity or suggestions on what frameworks to try out as we addressed feedback and pain points.