Role: UX Research Lead
Background
For nearly 15 years, a hospital's process for checking how well their facility is performing against national benchmarks has been arduous and confusing. Information was only available in lengthy PDF files that took hours -- sometimes days -- to run. Finding and comprehending the relevant data to ensure that it got to the right people within a facility was laborious. As the sole researcher on this project, I worked closely with the lead designer to design and test a new process that would decrease the burden on users as well as the system itself.
Research Questions
Based on our generative research, I knew that users were accessing this data for two main reasons: 1) To understand how well their facility is doing and where they need to improve; and 2) To slice and dice the data to share the appropriate information with different hospital departments. We designed the prototype to align with these actions and wanted to test whether our prototype met our goals to make this process easier and faster. I also wanted to test whether our solution was meeting our business goals to decrease burden on hospitals and our systems. This lead to our four metrics of success to test against:
Data comprehension
Data shareability
Hospital burden (time, number of steps, hospital satisfaction)
System burden
Approach
I created a usability test drew upon the System Usability Scale (SUS) to test against these metrics and for overall usability. I created a four-point scale to determine how well users moved from task to task within the prototype and asked baseline questions to begin to understand how this prototype might reduce hospital burden. I tested the prototype with 15 users over three different stages of prototype development.
Findings and Impact
By the third round of the prototype, all users scored about 80% on the task-based portion, indicating that flow of slicing up data, then sharing was intuitive and desirable functionality.
Users indicated that their time and labor in sharing data has reduced by 30%.
New process has reduced overall burden on the system because users did not have to pull data from the backend every time they want to access it. Users can now access data anytime.
Time spent pulling data has reduced from days to minutes.
Research artifacts