problem

The existing Care Plan activity is outdated and inefficient. Nurses and therapists report too many unnecessary clicks. The Care Plan is a regulatory requirement, and users do not necessarily want to spend time documenting it. The goal of the redesign is to streamline the documentation process and create a more user-friendly activity.

role

I served as the User Experience Coordinator on this project. I was responsible for writing and coordinating usability studies as well as analyzing and reporting the results. I worked on a team with UX designers, developers, and software testers on this project.

summary

The Care Plan activity is part of the electronic medical record (EMR) used by nurses and therapists in an inpatient setting. Providers work together to set goals for admitted patients. These goals make up the Care Plan, and the activity is used to document a patient’s progress towards those goals.

ethnographic research/shadowing

Prior to starting development on this project, the team conducted ethnographic research. This took the form of shadowing our users using the existing Care Plan activity. We payed attention to the users frustrations and took note of the things they liked about the existing activity. We asked questions when needed, but mainly observed.

what we learned

Through this research, we learned that our users were frustrated by the number of clicks required to get through their workflow. The users wanted to hop in and hop right out of this activity. The biggest issues had to do with how much time this documentation took for users.

prototyping

Next, the team began prototyping. Prototypes were made in live development so that it could be tested with full interaction. To create the prototypes, the project team met very frequently to hash out designs and come to conclusions. The Care Plan is a very complex tool and is used by many different people, so these design decisions were very involved.

my role

For this part of the project, I combined my knowledge of usability design principles with the information learned from the initial ethnographic research to influence the design decisions. I made suggestion and explained the “why” behind them. I also took note of points of controversy that may be important to usability test.

Task-based usability testing

The next step was testing out our prototypes. This took the form of task-based studies. During the studies we asked the users to complete tasks using the new version of the activity. Facilitators recorded task completion scores and other metrics to answer design questions and determine usefulness of features. The study looked at things like: “Is this icon intuitive?” “Do uses go through the workflow in the way it was deigned?” “Which button do the users click on first?” etc. These scores were analyzed and used to determine whether or not the designs were effective. These studies were performed both remotely and in-person.

my role

My role in this testing was to write the studies, facilitate many of the sessions, and analyze and report the results.

iteration

After looking at the results of the usability testing, the design team began making changes. These changes included things like making it more obvious that an icon had hover capabilities and changing the way the information on the screen moves when sections are expanded to give a less jumpy feel. These changes were tested and tweaks were made until it was just right.

Where are we now?

This project has shipped as part of an Epic release. It is being used my nurses and therapists today. Small changes will continue to be made as feedback comes in to make improvements not necessarily noticed in simulated testing.

Constraints

organizational differences

The Care Plan is a very integrated activity. Each organization uses it differently and the content varies from organization to organization as well. Participants in the testing often did not understand the difference between content and development and this resulted in some unusable feedback.