Context
Challenges
Sales teams who helped onboard new customers onto the beta programme said they didn’t usually demo the alerts feature because it ‘overwhelmed’ customers or they ‘weren’t ready for it yet’.
Customer-facing teams reported customers rarely spoke to them about medication alerts when giving feedback about their beta experience.
There was a lack of product data to quantify user adoption or engagement with the feature.
Results
Increase task success of creating and triggering a medication alert by 66%.
Significantly reduce the number of errors per session.
Save users over 2 minutes per alert using the new journey.
'Too complex for me'…
User Research
67%
(4/5) Failed to correctly create a medication alert.
17% didn't attempt the task.
17%
(1/5) Successfully completed the task.
Using an example client record that already had medication alerts set up, as a guide.
3:03 mins
was the time spent by the successful user to complete the task.
7 errors
were made on average per session.
Defining success.
Upon discussing these findings with internal stakeholders, it was felt improvements needed to prioritise the user’s perception of complexity and time investment. With this in mind, and given the limited amount of user data available, we considered the following measures to guide and quantify the success of any design enhancements we implemented.
01.
02.
03.
Simplifying two distinct tasks.
Ideation
I led a design workshop with various internal teams to review the existing user journey for creating a medication alert. The individual steps in the journey were represented on post-it notes on a whiteboard, and as ideas were explored we moved, added, or removed items to help visualise and articulate ideas.
In line with the customer feedback steps 4 and 5 in the user journey, which required users to identify administration responses as ‘desired’ or ‘undesired’, were discussed at length. The use of language and placement of the alerts feature also gained a lot of attention, and it was suggested having the alerts feature at the bottom of a medication record, which was already a lengthy form, contributed to user fatigue.
With various ideas for solutions, I went away and wireframed the most promising options, which separated the alert creation capability onto another page. In this flow, the user could create an alert in medication settings, and then decide what actions would ‘trigger’ the alert on the original medication record page. Consequently, I was also able to remove the concepts of ‘desired’ and ‘undesired’ outcomes, which was a source of friction in the previous designs.
To review, I bought the stakeholders back and presented the wireframes. Stakeholders were enthusiastic – the updated designs would allow users to create one alert and reuse it several times, however, there were some concerns if the user would understand how to ‘apply’ an alert properly. To test the designs, I developed a prototype and conducted some usability testing.
Significantly improved user understanding.
Testing and Iteration
To test the suggested design I developed a simple click-through prototype using Marvel, and tested the usability using Maze.
Task 1: In the new eMARS settings page create a medication alert to notify a chosen staff member of a medication issue, via your preferred method.
Result: 83% of testers completed task 1. Spending an average of 1.5 seconds on each step in the flow.
83% success
10/12 users were now able to successfully create an alert.
5
Errors were made in total across all 12 testing sessions.
00:23
The fastest user completed task 1 and 2 within 23 seconds.
'Much better for the way we work'.
Impact
Before implementing the proposed changes, we considered the testing results in the context of the measures of success we previously defined. At the beginning of this process our priorities were to;
01.
02.
03.
We were pleased to see for many of these metrics, we not only achieved but excelled at what we were aiming for. For example;
In both task 1 and task 2 we saw an 83% success rate using the new designs, so now 10/12 users were able to successfully create and trigger an alert (even across the 2 different pages).
We also saw a drastic decrease in errors, despite aiming for less than 5 errors per session, in these prototypes we only saw 5 user errors in total. We were hopeful the iteration to include some default options would decrease this number even further.
Our final measure of success was time-related to address users’ perception of the time needed to set up an alert. This measure was far exceeded by the fastest user who completed both tasks in 23 seconds.
+66% success
From 17% task success in original designs to 83% in new designs.
-6.5 errors
5 errors were made in total across all 12 testing sessions, reducing the average of errors from 7 to 0.5 per session!
02:37 sec saved
From 03:03 minutes to success in initial designs, to 00:23 seconds the latest flow.
Next steps.
The final designs were planned and road-mapped for development.
Work to track feature adoption through user tracking data was prioritised and brought forward.
The customer-facing teams revamped the onboarding experience tailored for new beta testers, and collaboration with marketing and sales teams was enhanced to align the messaging of the medication feature.