Challenge

Providence Health & Services wanted to ensure a high degree of usability in a new web application development effort. With little insight into how patients currently manage their healthcare, and what they would expect from a system that changed their current behavior, Providence Health & Services needed to profile current user behavior.

Privacy is another huge challenge. Not only are HIPPA (Health Privacy Rule) regulations lurking behind online healthcare records but all doctor-patient communications are privileged. Worse, user perception of privacy provides a design challenge—When do patients know their information is secure? How can they tell? What is the difference between the public site and the private web application in the user’s mind? (Privacy concerns rank as the #1 issue for consumers online).

Another key question was how to take fixed business requirements and match them to user expectations. Who should the new online personal health tools cater to? What priorities and decisions need to be made? What should the development team focus on? How will usability data fit into the new Agile development process?

Experience Dynamics conducted the first stage of a three part User Centered Design process: user research. To gain a comprehensive understanding of user needs and expectations, the user research would take a two-fold approach: quantitative online surveys (4,025 users) and qualitative contextual interviews (40 in-home visits). Experience Dynamics intercepted site visitors from Providence.org and provided an opt-in survey with questions ranging from health management to issues with the patient-doctor experience.

"While building our portal for primary care patients and health plan members, Experience Dynamics helped to ground our planning efforts in research. This work provided compelling insights into our customers’ lifestyles, health challenges, attitudes and practices. An initial field study not only helped us to make initial planning decisions and provided data that we continually referred to – but also yielded an unexpected benefit: photos and quotes that “sold” the vision throughout the organization more powerfully than standard data ever could have". -Lisa Gloor, Director, Web Experience, Providence Health & Services

The next step in the User Centered Design process involved creating user interface design concepts (wireframes or information architecture). The first round of wireframes were initially created by another vendor. Experience Dynamics was engaged for a re-working of the wireframe design phase, to incorporate findings from the user research and create ‘visually enhanced wireframes’ that the executive team could understand.

Wireframe designs were created to reflect usability as well as business requirements. Once iterated to incorporate internal feedback from stakeholders, the wireframes would need to be validated, the third and final step of the User Centered Design process.

"Experience Dynamics then created prototypes, partnering with our business leaders to translate our vision onto paper. Working very closely with our stakeholders, Experience Dynamics provided a process that effectively balanced business goals with user needs and preferences. Finally, we conducted user testing, which further validated assumptions and clearly highlighted the places that needed more work. It was invaluable to have a research-driven methodology to help guide our first steps into creating an online health care portal for our customers". -Lisa Gloor, Director, Web Experience, Providence Health & Services

Experience Dynamics screened, recruited and invited patients to online usability testing sessions, product usage walk-throughs of the concept web application. Patients were given scenarios mimicking their realistic workflow and instructed to complete a dozen key tasks, ranging from user registration to emailing a doctor and signing up to other privacy-protected ‘services’ like healthcare records and prescription refills.

The rapid usability testing provided essential validation of concepts derived from the home visits, the wireframe iterations, and the product management and business team requirements for the user experience vision.