patient portal

With rising competition in the field of consumer telemedicine, we identified that a modern, patient-focused user experience was important to Alpha's user retention, engagement and growth. We spent several months doing research, design and development for a redesign of our patient portal.

I worked closely on a diverse team represented by design, product, brand marketing, growth and engineering.

• We conducted user interviews and competitor research to discover focus areas for the redesign of the portal.

After understanding our user needs and business goals, we developed a set of product values which our department could rally behind. Each one was tied directly to a user need and a relevant design pattern.

Using this framework improved our team's efficiency in these ways:

• a clear association between "why" there is a user need and "how" we might solve for it

• consistency among categories of features and design system components

• foundation for a design system driven by the company's product and brand

• allows balancing of product values across the platform

Our project squad was made of 1 product manager, 1 product designer, 1 UX writer, 1 QA engineer and 3 software engineers. We had agile ceremonies including scrum, sprint planning, sprint review and a mix of backlog refinement and design review sessions. We were dedicated to developing an agile product design process that belonged not just to the designer, but to the entire squad. Every member, regardless of role, was involved at each phase and was encouraged to give their own perspective informed by their unique expertise.

This continuous involvement, especially from the engineers, led to:

• more holistic solutions that had fewer technical and UX gaps

• a solid grasp of feasibility as the project evolved

• a deeper and more complete understanding of the project requirements during development

• fewer discrepancies between mockups and release

• a strong sense of ownership by every member of the squad such that decisive actions could be taken whenever problems arose before/after release

In order to optimize design and development, we front-loaded a lot of the effort by developing a design system while the project progressed i.e., as each section of the portal was decided on, the necessary components were designed then added to a Figma library and then built in Storybook with an object oriented/abstract approach. This led to a growing library of components that could be expanded as new needs arose.

Our squad spent a number of months developing and refining our agile design and development process, leading to a significant increase in our team's productivity. By taking a stepwise approach to breaking down a project into stories, as the developers made progress, each ticket was completed in a testable, "launch-able" state. This made our sprints more productive as devs and QA engineers could work in parallel, leading to much more robust deliverables.

See Agile Process for more details.

1. Buy-in from stakeholders and leadership of other departments

   • Our team faced some difficulty getting approval for this project from upper management, mainly due to the shifting nature of business goals, the growth of the team and the increased number of priorities.

2. Detangling information hierarchy

   • The version of the portal prior to the redesign included a large amount of design and technical debt. In particular the way a patient's visits were organized was more of a laundry list rather than a categorized collection. It took a lot of discussions with the broader team to get everyone on the same page about the numerous concepts at play (primary care vs urgent care vs return visits vs upcoming visits) so we could find common ground on the best path forward.

What could we have done differently?

More controlled user testing through formal methods or even guerrilla tactics.

1. • While we did some user testing with feedback from the healthcare team, we could have spent more time testing each feature with a group of users or real patients.

   • Since there is often a lack of resources, I am of the belief that we could have committed to more guerrilla tactics like dogfooding or gathering informal feedback via self-reporting/automated feedback tools within the platform.

The portal led to an increase in user engagement as well as an increase in productivity for the product team. Not only did we launch a modern healthcare platform, but we developed a reliable design system and agile process that improved team satisfaction. Here's a showcase of the final mockups. High fidelity versions can be found in the web app at Hello Alpha, but you'll have to create an account. This project also taught me a lot about product management, components in Figma, cross-functional collaboration and how to actually go about agile UX in practice.