Scene Health: Global Notifications
Adding a notifications feature in an existing electronic medical records and engagement system to improve patient outcomes
Project Type: UX/UI, Research, Feature Flag
Length: 1 month (September 2024)
Role/Team: Designer (👋🏽), Sr. Designer, Product Manager, and Engineering
Summary
In two design sprints I designed and handed-off a notifications feature to add into our existing electronic medical records system. The new feature decreased our care team’s response time by nearly 24 hours and contributed to patient satisfaction and care outcomes.
Company Background
Scene Health is a health technology company pioneering solutions to solve medication non-adherence and provide care for chronic illness.
Problem
The care team consisting of nurses and coaches struggled with keeping up with various care and patient engagement tasks as they balanced a growing panel of patients. More specifically, care providers were not notified within the electronic medical record system of key patient milestones or actions and relied on email notifications and Slack messaging.
Existing product feedback and tickets were a great starting point to understand user paint points and problems
Users shared the types of triggers that required action on their part which uncovered the need to constantly re-prioritize tasks throughout the day
Given the project requirements and constraints, it was clear that we needed to design a notifications systems to better support care team members. I conducted a competitive analysis and design pattern research on common apps users used to understand component behavior, UI, and features.
User Personas
User personas helped understand the shared and differing goals and pain points and proved useful during design reviews and engineering refinements.
📝 Prioritization & Roadmapping
There were several design constraints that included sprint deadlines, budget, team adoption, and existing features in the product. Ultimately we prioritized three features in the design sprint:
There was considerable back and forth between teams to determine what we prioritized. I facilitated several conversations with key stakholders and the design/engineering team to determine our top priorities
🔀 User and Task Flows
I spent a considerable amount of time mapping various flows to both understand user actions but also the back-end actions associated with each trigger. The task flows helped various teams understand the complexity of notifications and the associated behaviors/actions that needed to occur.
Miro was a useful tool to not only map flows but also collaborate with stakeholders. The team referred to these often to avoid making assumptions about user behaviors.
💡 “Aha!” moment!
It was apparent after making the various flows that I not only needed to design a way for users to view notifications, but help guide users to the action once a notification is viewed and clicked. When a notification is clicked users needed to be directed to a deep link to the action that needed to take place (e.g. respond to a message).
🧪 Testing & Iterations
I conducted several rounds of testing and design reviews that uncovered several key design considerations and changes:
Users desired a UI that felt familiar. The EMR had various features that were recently launched so users craved a highly familiar and easy to use interface that followed design patterns found in other systems and programs (see competitive analysis).
Notifications as a to-do list. An unforeseen insight was that users shared was that notifications became a de-facto “To Do List” that they can sort and filter as needed.
Finding the “Goldilocks” amount of content and data. I tested various versions that included simple to more detailed amount of information for each notification. Ultimately, settling on a version that included just the right amount of information for the user to make the quickest decision.
Working within an existing design system, I was able to quickly test and iterate various version at mid/high fidelity.
✍🏽 Key Design Components
Notifications Modal
An overlay that was displayable when clicked from the main menu. The functions of the modal needed to remain simple given that it was displayed over the user’s active window. The goal was for it serve as a "quick-view” that they can choose to explore further or come back later.
Notifications Dashboard
Users needed a central location to manage and organize notifications (as opposed to them disappearing altogether). The dashboard needed to have the functionality to sort, filter, and mark as read/unread. The UI needed to be both familiar and easy to learn.
🤔 Final Thoughts & Next Steps
We were able to design and hand-off this feature on-time which helped meet the key objectives and goals of several teams.
This project allowed to build rapport with several stakeholders including our care team, engineers, and product manager. As a small design team, I also had the opportunity to contribute to our design system by adding new components and documenting appropriate uses accordingly.
Next Steps:
Add additional functionality to the notifications feature. Functions on user wishlists included being able to mute/unmute specific types of notifications.
Build pathways for new triggers. I designed the feature to be scaleable in order for us to quickly add new notification triggers in the future.
🔎 Research
With existing product feedback I spent one week conducting user interviews to better understand pain points in order to prioritize design iteration to meet project constraints. Key findings from interviews included:
Constant toggling between various systems and tools. 100% of users needed to toggle between email, Slack, Salesforce, and the EMR to manage patent tasks which disrupted their workflow throughout the day.
Mentally triaging important actions. Throughout the day users triaged patient needs which often left some patients unengaged who were less acute.
Care team actions started and ended within the EMR. Actions were performed within the EMR system including responding to patients via messages/videos and adjusting patient care plans.
