the client

UnitedHealth Premium is a program serving 300,000+ physicians and physician administrators across the country. The program assigns physicians contracted with UHC a designation (or rating) based on their cost efficiency and quality of care. 

This designation is displayed within the physician's public profile on UHC directories. Patients use the directories to find physicians in their area; they can see the designation within the physician profile. There are financial incentives for patients to select Premium-designated physicians; therefore, physicians want to know what their designation is, what cost and claims data was used to determine the designation, and if there is a way for them to overturn or challenge the designation. 

the challenge

The current portal suffers from a range of usability issues that prevent physicians from easily accessing their designation and understanding their assessment results.

The client was looking for us to design a new user experience that streamlined the process for physicians to access and understand their designations, as well as a more integrated solution for submitting reconsideration requests.

bolster physician trust and confidence

A key objective was to make the program more transparent with physicians - the client wanted the site to help providers feel confident about how the program worked and give them easy access to the cost and quality data used to determine their designations.

MY ROLE

As UX Lead, I supervised a team of two User Experience Designers and two User Interface Designers focused on the design of the application.

Driving ideation

I planned and lead a collaborative joint application design session, that brought together the business, development, product, and design teams together to synthesize ideas into what would become the administrative portal for the application.

Pushing user research and infuse collected insights

I planned and coordinated user research activities and used the collected intelligence to drive and prioritize new product features and existing feature enhancements.

Facilitate collaboration

I ensured that the design team collaborated with developers and data management throughout the project to ensure the product design maximized the capabilities of the technology and available data.

Leverage User-centered Design methodologies

I created design specifications, including wireframes, workflow diagrams, site and journey maps and personas that define the features, functionality, and design patterns used within the site.

Design, Test, Iterate

I built hi-fidelity prototypes using Axure software and used this to test the designs using remote user-testing techniques.

Ensure Quality Deliverables

I pushed to ensure our design artifacts and assets were delivered on time, of the highest quality, and maintained a consistent visual language and style across the systems we were building.

first step: talking with our users

We began the project by talking with provider administrators to learn more about how they use the current web portal to view the designations for physicians in their practice.  During these sessions we asked the users to physically show us the various systems, tools, and devices they use when working. Interviews allowed us to see first-hand many of the issues that plagued the site. 

users struggle with understanding their designation

Our primary concern was the confusion users had with the designation display itself. They struggled with what each designation meant, and what factors were used to determine it. The user interviews made it clear that our primary goal would be to create a platform where providers can better understand their designation and easily and knowledgeably take action.

our persona: susan

Using the information collected from our interviews, we were able to develop a key persona that represented our users - Susan, the provider administrator.  Her behaviors, challenges, habits, and several key characteristics all combined to give a clear picture of who we were designing for.

works on behalf of many physicians

Most physicians do not have the time to address issues with their designation. In a majority of cases, they assign this effort to Susan, their office administrator. Susan works on behalf of many, if not all the physicians in her clinic. This finding lead us to designing a "Group Summary" display that gives Susan a high-level overview of how her clinic is performing. 

focused on helping physicians improve their designation status

Susan's primary goal is to identify the lower tier physicians within her clinic, understand the driving factors that led to that lower designation, and find opportunities to improve those physicians to get them to a higher tier.

Throughout the project, a large poster of Susan resided on our wall to help remind ourselves to always be designing for her. "Is this going to help Susan?" was a question we would ask ourselves if we struggled with whether a feature or functionality belonged in the design. 

Co-Design Workshop

To kickoff the project with our client, we hosted a co-design workshop which brought together the key stakeholders, business owners, development leads, and design team together into one room.  For three days, we worked together on various team activities such as a walkthrough of the user journey map and persona to highlight the pains points and brainstorm capabilities to address them.

mapping out the user's journey

We set out to gain a shared understanding of the overall user experience.  During fusion, we built out a journey map that showed us all of the various touch points we have with Susan throughout the year. Since we had members from all facets of the business organization - from marketing, customer support, to provider outreach - our map was infused with great perspectives and insights. This was also an opportunity to highlight the pain points and opportunities for innovation we had across the jouney.

building a storyboard for our new journey

Our next step was to build a storyboard of our ideal user experience. This story illustrated how we would treat every aspect of the user's experience - from the initial contact with the provider via mail, their experience of viewing and responding to their designation on our website, to the way we would further correspond with them via a secure message center available on the site. 

MVP Definition and release road map

Another design artifact that my team created out of the fusion session was a minimum viable product (MVP) guide and road map.  This served to help us forecast and plan how we would build the application. It also served to prioritize features, with business and development input.

our greatest challenge: The designation display

Perhaps the greatest opportunity within this project was to create an easier, more intuitive display of the physician designation. Given the complexity of the underlying algorithms that drive it, this would serve to be our biggest challenge. Think of your FICO credit score. Everyone has one, but it's difficult to teach somebody exactly what factors influence your score. Similarly, we had to present our designation in such a way that made it immediately make sense.

evolving the design over many Iterations

To get this thing right, it took many design iterations of how we would visualize the physician's results. We eventually landed on a "thermometer" type design that best communicated the nature of the result, and it seemed to resonate the best with users. We took that concept and ran with it, developing out the full page display using that as a central visual to anchor the page.

innovations to help susan get work done 

the group summary display

We designed and developed a Group Summary display that allowed Susan to get a high-level view of how the physicians of her clinic were performing. A "donut" graph displayed how many first, second, and third tier physicians made up her physician roster. She could use this to quickly find and focus her efforts on the lower-tier physicians. A search, filter, and sort feature gave her the tools she needed to locate and access physician quickly. 

The designation snapshot

Once Susan had identified a physician in her clinic who was "lower-tier", she needed immediate access to a "snap-shot" or overview of the physician's designation assessment. We developed a Designation Overview, which could download or print easily to share with her physicians. It gave the physician a snap shot view of the factors influencing his or her designation display. 

helping physicians improve the quality of their care

The next innovation on the project was a suite of provider performance metrics and visualizations. Once Susan had identified the specific factors where the physician was struggling, she could use these interactive graphs to drive into the specific details to find and highlight the opportunities her physician had to improve. 

rapid prototyping and user testing

As these features were designed, I assembled designs into an Axure prototype to serve a few purposes. First, to show the client a realistic click-through presentation of the user experience. Second, to provide development with a complete and realistic view of how the pages should look and work when the user clicks through it.  Thirdly, we put the prototype in front of actual users to get their feedback and to reveal usability issues and opportunities to improve the experience. 

Throughout the design and development process we conducted user testing with physicians and physician administrators to identify usability issues and to validate our designs in front of the actual folks who would be using the tool. We used remote user testing techniques to perform the tests over the phone using a screen sharing service. This enabled us to get feedback quickly and iterate and evolve the design at a rapid rate.

My role during testing was to work closely with the user research team to develop the moderator script, task list, and consolidate the findings.  Drawing on my extensive experience using Axure, I oversaw the development of the Axure prototype used for testing.

The results of the test helped us continually improve the design and identify and resolve usability problems and make the user experience constantly improve as the project went on. 

key takeaways

test often with actual users

This helped us improve the design rapidly, and gave our customers the opportunity to provide input into how the application would be built.  

ensure design, business, and development are in sync

We had the system architects, engineers, database admins, and experience team collaborating together from the very start of the project. By having all facets of the project team in sync and working together towards a central vision, it helped us move quickly through the development process.

designing a new product is hard but tremendously rewarding work

It takes determination and hard work to create something you can be proud of. The journey towards release is fraught with ups and downs. It helps to regularly think about that end user and the positive difference we are making in their lives.