Care Management Application

Catalyst Health Group is an ecosystem of primary care physicians, practices, professionals and partners focused on delivering enhanced patient experiences, improved community health, reduced costs and improved satisfaction with physicians.

They have a care management application designed to facilitate the delivery, coordination, and management of healthcare services, particularly for patients with chronic conditions, elderly patients, or those requiring long-term care. This application is used by healthcare providers, including nurses, care managers, and other medical professionals, to improve patient care and streamline administrative processes.

Problem Statement

Company’s current care management application is experiencing several usability challenges. Nurses report that the app is not intuitive, leading to prolonged data entry times and increased risk of errors. Key functionalities, such as tracking patient history and inputting real-time data, are cumbersome and inefficient. These issues hinder the overall workflow, causing frustration among nurses and potentially compromising the quality of care provided to elderly patients.

Key Issues Identified:

1. Usability and Navigation: The app interface is not user-friendly, causing confusion and requiring extensive time for nurses to navigate and complete tasks.

2. Data Entry Efficiency: Recording health data is time-consuming, with complicated forms and steps that are not streamlined for quick input during patient visits.

3. Error Prevention: The app design increases the likelihood of input errors, which can compromise the accuracy of patient health records.

4. Patient History Access: Nurses find it difficult to access and review comprehensive patient histories, which is crucial for informed decision-making during care.

My Role

Led end-to-end product design, research, validation and handoff.

Business Objectives

• An intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface that enhances user experience and reduces the time required for data entry.

• Streamlined data entry processes with simplified forms and fewer steps.

• Improved error prevention mechanisms, such as real-time validation and user-friendly prompts.

• Better access to comprehensive patient histories, enabling nurses to make informed care decisions efficiently.

Personas

Navigation Flow

The navigation flow is a critical component in the design lifecycle, as it directly impacts how users interact with a product or service.

This is a navigation system of our Primary User Nurses, Jane Miller from our Personas.

Wireframes

Wireframes play a crucial role in the design lifecycle, serving as a blueprint for the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). Here are some reasons why wireframes are important:

1. Clarifying Vision and Concept

2. Cost and Time Efficiency

3. Visualisation of Content Hierarchy

4. Communication Tool for Collaboration

Design Guidelines

A visual language includes both the written and spoken elements of a website or brand, as well as every design technique, photo, icon, logo and item, users can see on the screen. I created a UI Style Guide for the product to bring cohesion to the digital product’s user interface and experience. Now across the product the experience is same with UI Consistency.

Old Mockups

Major issues identified:

• Complex Navigation: Navigation is scattered all over the screen, it was very difficult to navigate through the tasks making it inefficient for the users.

• Poor Feedback: There was no messaging on actions in the old design keeping user puzzled of his action success or failure.

• Cluttered Interface: The product was information heavy, it was very delicate to handle lot of data there. It is evident in the screens that it was poorly handled without any hierarchy of information.

• Slow Performance: Delays in loading times or response times was frustrating for users and lead to a negative perception of the product.

• Lack of Error Prevention: No validations were handled in screens resulting in frequent mistakes that was disrupting the user experience.

• Non-Responsive Design: Though the application was not designed for mobile devices but it was inefficient to use on small desktop/laptop screens as well.

Renewed Mockups

New features included like:

• Easier Navigation: Establishing seamless navigation was a bit tricky in this application as the relation was one to many here. But somehow we achieved it with clear hierarchy.

• Clean Interface: Interface is made clean for easier readability and clear navigation with proper feedback and alerting system. The data was handled very consciously giving proper hints and decisive information handy on the screen.

• Slow Performance: Page loading was handled by practicing various methods like lazy loading, etc.

• Non-Responsive Design: The new design was made scalable to fit into small desktop screens and widescreens as well. It can also be loaded on large size tablets.

Impacts

System Usability Testing We ran a System Usability Survey for the employees to understand how the new design if performing for them. We received about 113 responses out of 154.

Time on Task We measured time taken for completing a set of tasks on old verses new system. It was remotely operated time bound activity for 7 users on 1-1 basis.