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

Users desired a notifications feature that was easy to learn and was similar to existing systems and design patterns.

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.

Personas helped design reviews and engineering refinements stay focused on user needs and goals.

Deadlines, budgets, and feature implementation prioritized 3 key features and deliverables.

01 Notifications Modal/Overlay

Interface that allows users to view and interact with notifications from any screen on the EMR

02 Notifications Trigger Flows

Identify notification triggers and the associated deep links that guide users to the necessary actions

03 Notifications Dashboard

Dashboard interface where users can manage all active and archived notifications

Mapping user and task flows uncovered the need to simplify tasks to support actions that support patient care

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.

Usability tests uncovered user desires and needs that were not apparent during discovery.

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 Deliverables

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.

Using multiple systems disrupted workflows and delayed actions needed to engage with patients.

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.