File Tracking Tool
RL Solutions, 2018
Business Problem
After a frontline healthcare worker has submitted a file (incident report) into the RL system, they receive no feedback on any steps taken because of the report. As a result, frontline workers are not able to draw a connection between incident reporting and patient experience/hospital improvements. This was a concern clients raised at the annual User Group Conference.
Approach
Inspired by the Domino’s Pizza Tracker, a team of developers, designers, and QA was assembled to develop a feedback loop to users of RL who submit an incident report. My role was to help the team understand the problem from the user’s perspective and lead the usability testing.
I began by leading the group through an idea brainstorming activity and then through the creation of statements that define the frontline submitters’ needs. From this point, the team brainstormed designs and the UX Designer began to develop low-fidelity designs.
Remote user testing
I arranged remote interviews with contacts provided by the product management team. Since the contacts provided were management-level users, I was able to gather an understanding of how this problem affects directors and managers. However, I still needed to speak with frontline users, since the scope of the project was not to serve management-level users. I leveraged the conversations I had with directors to gain access to frontline users. I connected with 5 users (nurses, doctors, pharmacists) and ran remote usability tests on the low-fidelity wireframes.
For each testing session, I had two team members join me as observers. I asked them to take notes on what they observed and learnt during the session. After the sessions were complete, we met at a team to discuss what everyone had observed during the session. The team members transferred their findings onto stickies and we organized the findings by participant on the wall. We were then able to discuss patterns and next steps based on what we were seeing. I took the role of summarizing everyone’s thoughts and translating them into additional user needs that could be addressed in the following weeks.
Reviewing all our notes from testing
Notes were shared on the wall and next steps were immediately discussed as a group.
Results
The usability tests revealed that the level of information we were showing did not satisfy what frontline staff wanted to know. While they were aware that they did not have a way to see what happened to a file they submitted, seeing our designs peaked their curiosity. What we had to show was not enough information. They wanted to know more details about where in the review and improvement process their file was sitting.
Despite these findings, it was not technically feasible to show everything frontline staff wanted to know. As a way to remedy this, we opened up the action log that is created when any user accesses a file, and transformed logs into small updates that reveal when someone had done something to the file. Although we were not able to show exactly what was being done, we were able to display general actions being taken on the file which would indicate progress in the improvement phase.
The project has since received positive feedback from our early adopters, but has yet to be released.