An ethnographic research conducted to understand hospital sign-out process, identify pain points, and provide design directions.
Conduct design research to help Mott Children Hospital identify problems with the current resident sign-out process, to help residents go home when they are supposed to.
A user research report was presented to hospital executives and a team of residents to explain the bottlenecks found in the resident sign-out process, followed by a participatory design session to brainstorm and discuss potential solutions.
I collaborated with Dr. Joyce Lee and Jennifer Zank, Pediatrics Chief Resident at Mott Children hospital, to conduct this design research and design workshop. My individual works include: shadowing residents, analyzing interview transcripts, synthesizing design insights, creating and presenting the research finding report.
Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion for them. Help an adopter find a pet which matches their lifestyle, considering factors including breed, gender, age, temperament, and health status. Provide a high-level flow and supporting wire frames.
I spent 20 hours on this design exercise, the whole process involves conducting research, identifying design opportunities, brainstorming potential solutions, designing wireframes and high-fidelity mockups.
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Zephyr Illuminate is a cross-platform enterprise software offered primarily to med-device and pharmaceutical companies, targeting users in their marketing, sales, and analytics team. It provides users with analytics and visualizations of a variety of data sets to help them identify key accounts and/or understand how to engage with accounts effectively.
As there could be more than twenty charts and tables within one hospital/physician’s profile, Illuminate surfaces messages named “Recommendations” to help users know what the most valuable, actionable information within a profile is. However, as that information is only shown on a profile level, users had to open a profile to see this critical information. In other words, there is no way for users to know the existence of that information if they aren’t interested in the related profile. I proactively identified this as a potential user problem, and proposed a project to look deeper into it.
The initial goal of the project was to identify user pain points, and re-design the user experience around “Recommendations” to allows users to navigate to the most valuable, actionable information easily. More user needs and design opportunities were identified later in the process.
I first conducted stakeholder interviews with opinion leaders across product, customer success, and engineering teams to understand what were the customer/business problems we’re trying to solve with “Recommendations.” Three underlying business goals were identified from the interview sessions:
We saw a bottleneck of expanding to users at field teams, as they have limited time reviewing analytics, and often don’t understand how to use the analytics in their jobs. “Recommendations” were built to provide field users with simple, valuable, and actionable messages.
Our customers had requested to understand the ROI of using Zephyr Illuminate. “Recommendations" was built to allow users to “Resolve,” “Delete,” and provide feedback on a message, with the goal to track usage of the high priority information and then calculate ROI for our customers.
Some life science companies that have implemented CRM systems prefer not to have their field teams worry about using another tool. “Recommendations” were built to allow data sync with CRM tool like Veeva, which enables users to view all analytic insights and take actions on them without jumping out of their workflow.
I worked closely with the product team and customer success team to build personas for four different types of field users, to understand and identify information that can help them achieve their goals at work. In this process, I used RealtimeBoard to give all team members visibility into the persona building process and allowed team members to comment and ask questions about the personas.
From the four personas, I identified two kinds of information that can help all target users achieve their goals, and named them as "Activity Alerts" and "Call-to-actions."
It was also found that users need the above information on two levels: 1) aggregated level, to help them identify groups of entities that worth their attention; 2) individual level, to help them identify individual entities that worth their attention.
Based on the findings of persona study, I analyzed the current workflow around “Recommendations” to identify: 1) What needed information is missing 2) What UX is jeopardizing users’ abilities to find the needed information. Findings were concluded in this document, and informed the following Information Architecture design.
I designed a diagram to showcase a site structure that includes all missing information and makes all needed information more accessible to users. Three specific product improvements were included in the design: 1) a central space for users to view and interact with all "recommendations"; 2) Indicators that lets user know if an entity has "Recommendation" in List/Result View; 3) showing all "Recommendations" of an entity in its profile even when a Disease Area filter is selected. The latter two improvements were designed and shipped shortly after the IA design was delivered, I then focused on designing the new feature that integrates all recommendations in one place, which was later named "Insights Feed."
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Other than making the information findable, another important part of the project goal was to make the information usable. I wanted to design an engaging, intuitive browsing experience for users to view, prioritize, and interact with the content. From previous researches, it was found that user values different types of information which are all currently all being labeled as "Recommendations" in entity profiles. This inspired me to separate the different types of information in the UI and design browsing experiences tailored to the contents.
Since the target user, field teams at life science companies, were only using the Illuminate iPad app, we decided to design this new feature for the iPad experience first. Below shows a version of the wireframe designed.
The prototype was designed for the user test sessions. I collaborated with product and customer success team to create relevant mock-up content in the prototype. Some of the interactions (like "Resolve" and "Delete") were deliberately kept the same as the current UI of the "Recommendations" feature, so that we can gather feedback on those interactions, and iterate on it.
I planned, organized, and conducted user test sessions with the goals to validate the Insights Feed design concept, and integrate direct user feedback into later design iterations. The clickable prototype shown above was tested with 7 currents users of Zephyr Illuminate, from 3 different companies. All sessions were conducted remotely via video-conferencing platform that enables screen-sharing. Each session includes intro & setup, background interview, user need exploration, prototype testing, and a wrap-up interview. After conducting the interviews, I analyzed and synthesized the findings by building an affinity wall, and presented key findings to the whole company.
The insights feed concept was generally well received, all participants found at least one type of information helpful for their workflow, and were all excited about getting this feature the new landing page of the app.
On the other hand, we identified two main user problems: 1) the "dismiss" and "resolve" actions only make sense to users who are required to use CRM system; 2) users were confused by some wordings or category labels shown in the design. More findings can be viewed in this slide.
After identifying improvement opportunities from the user test session, one challenge I faced is to redesign the existing "resolve" and "dismiss" actions built for recommendations, as the new design needs to address two user need conflicts.
As mentioned as one of the business goals of the "Recommendation" feature, Illuminate's buyers (client company executives, project sponsors) have the need to understand how their teams are using the actionable information. From the user test sessions, we identify a conflicting user needs between the software's "buyers" and "users."
Buyer: "We need to know whether the field team has acted on a piece of information or not."
End user: "I'm not sure this will be helpful...If required to do so, I'll resolve many at once."
The new design includes two versions of configurable UI, with actions tailored to the two distinct uses cases. We internally named them "CRM friendly version" and "Standalone Version." Both versions of the design provide users with multiple touch-points to interact with the information, and thus help Zephyr track ROI for customers.
The design was inspired by the following insights gained from the user interviews:
1. When users see some actionable information in app, they usually have to take actions offline, at a later time. Sometimes they want to take several steps to address one piece of information.
2. A few users said “Bookmark” would be helpful for them to use as a “To-do List.” (And they wanted to have a message drops off from their feed after bookmarking).
I work closely with the product team to define requirements for different product release phases, and negotiated features for launch by balancing user needs with technical feasibilities and business goals. The first version of Insights Feed was released in our iPhone and iPad app at the end of April 2018.
Since launch, we've seen steady growth over the last 3 months of users getting to the right profiles directly from the Insights Feed. At the end of July, ~25% of profiles are now being opened through the Insights Feed. Additionally, we've seen an uptake of ~300% in the use of our profiles on a weekly basis.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
Zephyr Illuminate is a cross-platform enterprise software offered primarily to med-device and pharmaceutical companies, targeting users in their marketing, sales, and analytics team. It provides users with analytics and visualizations of a variety of data sets to help them identify key accounts and/or understand how to engage with accounts effectively.
Each approved pharmaceutical product/therapy has its own formulary status, which imposes tiers and restrictions at different insurance plans. The higher the tier of a medication, the more out-of-pocket cost a patient has to pay for it. The more restrictions a medication have, the more steps a physician has to take to prescribe it. Thus, when a drug has better formulary status in an insurance plan (lower tier, fewer restrictions), it is more likely or easier for a physician to prescribe it.
Life science companies use the word “market access” to describes how good or how bad their product’s formulary status is, in different insurance plans. They currently can only get market access data on an aggregated level (insurance or insurance plan level) instead of HCP level, and thus had no way to use that information to improve sales opportunities when engaging with HCPs.
The target users are pharmaceutical sales reps, whose primary goal is to increase sales in the assigned region by persuading HCPs to prescribe more of their company's products. From talking to our co-workers who used to be pharma sales reps, we learned more about the target users' specific needs and their working context. We concluded that our target users need market access information to 1) identify HCPs that have high potential to convert to their products base on market access; 2) deliver persuasive market-access-related messages to persuade those HCPs to sell more of their company's drugs.
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Our data science team analyzed a lot of different data points to surface "Market Access Potential" score, which can help users to quickly identify HCPs that have high potential to convert to their products base on market access. However, since "market access" is not a concept users are familiar with, we have to show them some underlying information to help them understand why an HCP has potential, and how they can use that information to form persuasive sales pitch. I started the information architecture design process by investigating the following questions:
HCPs usually have one “first-go-to” product which they tend to prescribe to most patients. Knowing choosing a product as their “first-go-to” can reduce overall prescribing restriction may drive them to change their “first-go-to” product.
For different therapies, HCPs may find particular kinds of restrictions (PA, ST, QL, not preferred tier) more painful than others, thus knowing using a product can reduce these kinds of restrictions for them, may also drive them to convert product choice.
It'll be very persuasive for a sales rep to tell an HCP: if you switch to my product 100% of the time, how many percents of restricted claims can be reduced comparing to your current prescribing behavior.
Or it'll also be persuasive for a sales rep to tell an HCP: how my product is advantageous against others for certain payer/plans which a good amount of his patients is using.
Layering in all the information into one space was challenging. We held multiple brainstorming sessions to explore ways to provide all necessary information while not overloading the user.
The design was iterated multiple times to accommodate some data analysis challenges and to incorporate user feedback gathered in design process.
The final design of this feature leveraged our new insights platform and balances information summary and highlights with access to detailed visualizations.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
Type 1 Diabetes is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin, a hormone needed to allow sugar (glucose) to enter cells to produce energy. The daily disease management for patients with T1D involves numerous tasks, and requires constant focus and effort, which was often found overwhelming by patients.
We looked into the pathology of T1D, the difference between T1D and T2D, and how do individuals monitor blood sugar and administer insulin.
We shadowed one patient with T1D for a day and interviewed eight patients to understand their daily routines, habits, and pain points of managing T1D.
We consolidated and reviewed all findings with an affinity diagram, which led to several key findings that inform the design solution.
Hypoglycemia could cause patients with T1D to pass out anytime, which can be caused by a variety of reasons. Most patients we interviewed with wear bracelets or tattoos to help them indicates their conditions during emergency.
From our the research, we found that most patients find using smartphone to log data is not as easy as using pen/paper because they need to first unlock their phone, open the app, enter data and select related data specification to complete the process, which needs to be performed numerous times in a day. This finding inspired me to design a feature that can allow the patients to easily log their data without unlocking their phone and can show them a predicted state of their blood sugar level. With this feature, the important data entry is always displayed as wallpaper on the phone. To activate data entry, users just need to use two fingers to tap the screen for twice. The balancing bar on the screen would move up or down base on an algorithm built to calculate a predicted glucose level for the user base on the data entry, time-lapse, and user profile.
Informed by the research, other feature of this management app includes a Drive Safe feature that gets activated when GPS detects the user starts to move in high speed and alarms the user when blood sugar level is not safe for driving or have not been log for a while; a calendar feature that help users to keep track of the daily, weekly and monthly status/progress of their blood sugar level; a reminder that allows the users to add personalized reminders base on Time/Location; and an emergency feature that enables users to get emergency help by writing a simple “S” shape on the phone screen.
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If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
Resident sign-out is the handoff that happens between residents in the hospital from day shift to night shift and night shift to day shift. Every day, after working for 12 hours, residents need to stay late and spend 1~2 more hours to do the sign-out. Residents at Mott Children Hospital expressed frustration with the sign-out process, as the prolonged process is exhausting for the team and may eventually result in a lower quality of patient care.
I shadowed an Intern Resident at Mott Children Hospital and her care team throughout the sign-in and sign-out process and reported the findings to my team. Here're two major findings identified from observation:
There is a 3-day rotation “call schedule” to enable each team to have an equal chance of signing out early and signing out late. The last team to sign-out had to spend time waiting for the other two teams to finish.
Residents have four different experience levels, apart from signing-out as a team, they also have to sign-out individually to resident with the same experience level. For instance, Intern signs out to Intern, Sub-I (Sub-intern, fourth-year medical student) sign out to Sub-I. However, since every team has a Sub-I, when a Sub-I in my observed team does the night shift, she will have to go to every other teams to get sign-out information.
We worked with the Chief Resident to understand the current process for teams and individuals to exchange sign-out information. I then mapped out the workflow in an infographic, which helps us to found that the same sign-out communication happens twice within Pre-Call Team and Post-Call Team, doubling their sign-out time, and delays the sign-out for the last team, Call Team.
Other than identifying problems in the administrative workflow around sign-out orders, we continue to examine the sign-out process by interviewing residents. We interviewed 4 intern residents and 4 senior residents at Mott Children Hospital. After that, we synthesized the factors that can lead to inefficient sign-out process, as shown in the slide below.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
We conducted a participatory design workshop, which brought together residents, hospital executives, designers, and engineers to discuss the problem and ideate solutions. Working together with this multidisciplinary team, we focused on redesigning the paper sign-out sheet, identified information needs for the sign-out process and then quickly developed paper prototypes of sign-out forms that can ensure communication of vital information and help residents understand high priority tasks.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
Scoliosis is a medical condition in which a person has a sideways curve in the spine. The scoliosis brace is utilized as a treatment to help young patients avoid surgery and prevent curve progression. UNYQ, a startup making 3D-printed scoliosis braces introduced a light-weight, better-designed brace to improve patients' willingness of wearing the brace. Starting in early 2016, UNYQ collaborated with Intel Healthcare Innovation team to create a new version of the brace, aiming to improve the scoliotic patient’s wearing experience further.
We conducted interviews and focus groups with scoliotic patients, their parents, and the clinical team to identify current pain points in brace wearing. Below are the main pain points identified:
“Am I wearing the brace properly?” “Is the brace adjusted correctly?” As the brace needs to apply pressure on the right points of the patient’s body to be effective, all patient interviewees are stressful about the fact that they are often getting constricted by the brace but not knowing whether it is being worn in the right way.
Patients and their parents are using different methods to track their bracing time (Planner or Google Calendar) and found the tracking process bothersome and time-consuming.
Physicians and nurses cannot keep track of whether the patient’s daily bracing time has reached the minimum recommended period (16 hrs), thus find it hard to provide follow-up treatment suggestions to patients and their parents.
As identified from the user research, it is valuable for both patients and clinicians to obtain data on whether the brace is correctly on, and the time periods of bracing. Our Intel technical team collaborated with UNYQ to design UNQY Align™, a new scoliosis brace with built-in sensors powered by the Intel® Curie™ Module, to measure real-time pressures applied by the brace and wear time.
When designing the mobile app that connects to the UNQY Align™ brace, I focused on finding ways to use information gathered from sensor to empower patients and make the treatment experience more engaging.
"Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion for them. Help an adopter find a pet which matches their lifestyle, considering factors including breed, gender, age, temperament, and health status. Provide a high-level flow and supporting wire frames."
As there could be more than twenty charts and tables within one hospital/physician’s profile, Illuminate surfaces messages named “Recommendations” to help users know what the most valuable, actionable information within a profile is. However, as that information is only shown on a profile level, users had to open a profile to see this critical information. In other words, there is no way for users to know the existence of that information if they aren’t interested in the related profile. I proactively identified this as a potential user problem, and proposed a project to look deeper into it.
The initial goal of the project was to identify user pain points, and re-design the user experience around “Recommendations” to allows users to navigate to the most valuable, actionable information easily. More user needs and design opportunities were identified later in the process.
I first conducted stakeholder interviews with opinion leaders across product, customer success, and engineering teams to understand what were the customer/business problems we’re trying to solve with “Recommendations.” Three underlying business goals were identified from the interview sessions:
We saw a bottleneck of expanding to users at field teams, as they have limited time reviewing analytics, and often don’t understand how to use the analytics in their jobs. “Recommendations” were built to provide field users with simple, valuable, and actionable messages.
Our customers had requested to understand the ROI of using Zephyr Illuminate. “Recommendations" was built to allow users to “Resolve,” “Delete,” and provide feedback on a message, with the goal to track usage of the high priority information and then calculate ROI for our customers.
Some life science companies that have implemented CRM systems prefer not to have their field teams worry about using another tool. “Recommendations” were built to allow data sync with CRM tool like Veeva, which enables users to view all analytic insights and take actions on them without jumping out of their workflow.
I worked closely with the product team and customer success team to build personas for four different types of field users, to understand and identify information that can help them achieve their goals at work. In this process, I used RealtimeBoard to give all team members visibility into the persona building process and allowed team members to comment and ask questions about the personas.
From the four personas, I identified two kinds of information that can help all target users achieve their goals, and named them as "Activity Alerts" and "Call-to-actions."
It was also found that users need the above information on two levels: 1) aggregated level, to help them identify groups of entities that worth their attention; 2) individual level, to help them identify individual entities that worth their attention.
Based on the findings of persona study, I analyzed the current workflow around “Recommendations” to identify: 1) What needed information is missing 2) What UX is jeopardizing users’ abilities to find the needed information. Findings were concluded in this document, and informed the following Information Architecture design.
I designed a diagram to showcase a site structure that includes all missing information and makes all needed information more accessible to users. Three specific product improvements were included in the design: 1) a central space for users to view and interact with all "recommendations"; 2) Indicators that lets user know if an entity has "Recommendation" in List/Result View; 3) showing all "Recommendations" of an entity in its profile even when a Disease Area filter is selected. The latter two improvements were designed and shipped shortly after the IA design was delivered, I then focused on designing the new feature that integrates all recommendations in one place, which was later named "Insights Feed."
Other than making the information findable, another important part of the project goal was to make the information usable. I wanted to design an engaging, intuitive browsing experience for users to view, prioritize, and interact with the content. From previous researches, it was found that user values different types of information which are all currently all being labeled as "Recommendations" in entity profiles. This inspired me to separate the different types of information in the UI and design browsing experiences tailored to the contents.
Since the target user, field teams at life science companies, were only using the Illuminate iPad app, we decided to design this new feature for the iPad experience first. Below shows a version of the wireframe designed.
The prototype was designed for the user test sessions. I collaborated with product and customer success team to create relevant mock-up content in the prototype. Some of the interactions (like "Resolve" and "Delete") were deliberately kept the same as the current UI of the "Recommendations" feature, so that we can gather feedback on those interactions, and iterate on it.
I planned, organized, and conducted user test sessions with the goals to validate the Insights Feed design concept, and integrate direct user feedback into later design iterations. The clickable prototype shown above was tested with 7 currents users of Zephyr Illuminate, from 3 different companies. All sessions were conducted remotely via video-conferencing platform that enables screen-sharing. Each session includes intro & setup, background interview, user need exploration, prototype testing, and a wrap-up interview. After conducting the interviews, I analyzed and synthesized the findings by building an affinity wall, and presented key findings to the whole company.
The insights feed concept was generally well received, all participants found at least one type of information helpful for their workflow, and were all excited about getting this feature the new landing page of the app.
On the other hand, we identified two main user problems: 1) the "dismiss" and "resolve" actions only make sense to users who are required to use CRM system; 2) users were confused by some wordings or category labels shown in the design. More findings can be viewed in this slide.
After identifying improvement opportunities from the user test session, one challenge I faced is to redesign the existing "resolve" and "dismiss" actions built for recommendations, as the new design needs to address two user need conflicts.
As mentioned as one of the business goals of the "Recommendation" feature, Illuminate's buyers (client company executives, project sponsors) have the need to understand how their teams are using the actionable information. From the user test sessions, we identify a conflicting user needs between the software's "buyers" and "users."
Buyer: "We need to know whether the field team has acted on a piece of information or not."
End user: "I'm not sure this will be helpful...If required to do so, I'll resolve many at once."
The new design includes two versions of configurable UI, with actions tailored to the two distinct uses cases. We internally named them "CRM friendly version" and "Standalone Version." Both versions of the design provide users with multiple touch-points to interact with the information, and thus help Zephyr track ROI for customers.
The design was inspired by the following insights gained from the user interviews:
1. When users see some actionable information in app, they usually have to take actions offline, at a later time. Sometimes they want to take several steps to address one piece of information.
2. A few users said “Bookmark” would be helpful for them to use as a “To-do List.” (And they wanted to have a message drops off from their feed after bookmarking).
I work closely with the product team to define requirements for different product release phases, and negotiated features for launch by balancing user needs with technical feasibilities and business goals. The first version of Insights Feed was released in our iPhone and iPad app at the end of April 2018.
Since launch, we've seen steady growth over the last 3 months of users getting to the right profiles directly from the Insights Feed. At the end of July, ~25% of profiles are now being opened through the Insights Feed. Additionally, we've seen an uptake of ~300% in the use of our profiles on a weekly basis.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.
