Empowering User Choice: Feature Design
My Role
User Research
Prototyping
UI Design
Team
UX Designer (Me)
2 Frontend Engineers
VP of Product
Tools
Figma
Survey Monkey
FullStory
Timeline
8 months
Project Overview
How might we help members find the highest quality provider that fits their needs?
Embold Health is a healthcare technology organization that helps self-insured employers improve healthcare for their employees by measuring provider performance and delivering it inside a doctor finding web application.
This project focused on adding Embold’s provider measurements to our member-facing tool to help our users find the highest quality providers.
Challenges
Balancing accuracy and accessibility
While the goal of the project was to add transparency into how providers are measured, from past research I knew that the language needed to be accessible in order for our users to understand how the provider ratings impact them. To give our users a clear picture of provider performance, the information we present needed to be accurate; for them to use that information to make a decision, it needed to be accurate and actionable.
Designing for many personas
Our two customers have very different employee populations in terms of education level, as well as resources such as time, transportation, and finances. This meant that our users spanned many demographics. We made sure to recruit participants for our survey and our usability tests with this in mind. We also split our participants by healthcare literacy, or experience with healthcare, to better understand the differences without making assumptions about what those differences meant.
Skepticism from past blunders
Our first attempt at solving this problem had done little to instill confidence across the organization that it was possible. We hadn’t involved other teams at the right stages, and so we had to overcome the doubt we created. One of the most important steps of this project would be to recruit other teams to help us solve this problem, as their participation would be essential to our success.
Research + Design Guiding Principles
User-driven
Feedback from users was our number one decision making tool: ultimately, if our design didn’t resonate with our users, we couldn’t connect our customers’ employees with the best providers. Our research included two surveys, user interviews, and a usability test with a fully-functional prototype.
Data-driven
Our next priority was to make sure we had a way to respond to real user behavior outside of the research setting. We worked with our engineers to set up Google Analytics to see how our designs influenced provider choices, and made a plan for how we would utilize FullStory to watch how users navigated and interacted with the tool once the new features went live.
Customer-driven
After the research and design phases, we spent the next few months giving demos of the new experience to our customers and helping them understand how the new features would enable their employees to make better healthcare decisions. This involved negotiating aspects of the design and finding solutions that made them comfortable without jeopardizing the success of the feature.
User Research
We wanted to understand what people care about most when looking for a doctor, so we started our research with a survey and one-on-one interviews.
Our participants informed us that distance and availability are the most important factors someone considers when looking for a provider. This finding drove the information hierarchy on the results and provider details pages.
We asked respondents what information they would need to know before they decided to visit a doctor. Unsurprisingly, the top answer was insurance coverage, as our respondents were located in the U.S. and had insurance through their employer or spouse’s employer. What did surprise us was that doctor quality came in second, since respondents also told us that it is difficult to choose a doctor due to the lack of objective information available.
We asked respondents which doctor they would choose based on the premise that their current doctor retired. I designed the doctor options to force respondents to make a trade-off between a high consumer reviews and high doctor quality. The consumer reviews came from the most well-known sources that we learned from a previous study. According to the results of the survey, the majority of respondents chose the doctors with high quality over those with positive consumer reviews, showing that users preferred objective quality information.
Collaborating with Internal Teams
From the beginning of the project, we included key stakeholders from teams across the organization. It was important not only to get their feedback and perspectives, but to create buy-in for the project.
After the initial design and usability tests, we set up a weekly meeting with the analytics and engineering team members who would be helping us bring the feature to life with our data. Throughout those collaborative meetings, we were able to help them understand the user problems behind the feature, and they showed us how the data could be used to solve those problems.
Final Designs
The Compare feature was designed and developed at the end of the project to address the need that came out of including so much more information on the doctor profiles. We wanted to help users better understand the key differences between doctors without requiring that they navigate between multiple screens. A few participants in the usability tests mentioned that they wanted to see doctors “side-by-side” to help make their final decision.