User research
I didn’t know much about the Providers, so I got the Business Development Manager in my squad to organise 4 half day visits with local care providers at their offices. The purpose of these visits was to –
- Observe the care Providers in their environment and how they use our product. We know in analytics some pages were hardly ever visited and we wanted to understand why not.
- Get their views on the seekers view redesign. We sent all providers an email about the redesign and we had little feedback on it, and wanted to understand their thoughts on it.
- Card sorting exercise of their top tasks they want done in the new Provider product
- Bonus task – participate in a participatory design exercise of what the new Provider dashboard could be like.
Picture of Provider designing what the new dashboard could look like
Click image to see larger image
Using Trello for the card sorting exercise
Click image to see larger image
Analysis
Observing and why some pages were not being used.
The Providers offices varied in size, depending on how big they were, but they were mostly open plan offices. From analytics we know that not many Providers are going into two pages – ‘My Profile’ and Accounts pages. During the visits, I asked the Providers about these pages and 3 out of 4 of the Providers didn’t realise that they were there and when explaining to them what the pages do, they all said that when they have a problem with their account (which they seldom do), they call their Account Manager straight away and get them to deal with it.
Seekers redesign
All of the Providers thought the redesign for the Seekers was a good idea. One Provider did have a concern in when they are busy they don’t want to be contacted by Seekers because his staff are already stretched as it is and don’t want to be dealing with Seekers who are just enquiring, especially if they can get most of the information on their Care Sourcer page or their own website.
Card sorting exercise
Although all the complete lists from each Provider varied in terms of their priority order, the top 3 tasks didn’t vary at all.
Participatory design
This was a bonus task and although all Providers did have time to do this, only 1 Provider felt comfortable to do this. This was a task to see how the Provider wanted the new dashboard to look like.
Wireframes and high fidelity design
Wireframe of new provider dashboard
Click image to see larger image
High fidelity design of provider dashboard
Click image to see larger image
User Testing
Once the high fidelity design was completed, I went into Principle to make it an interactive prototype to test it with Providers.
Picture of new Provider dashboard in Principle app
Click image to see larger image
Wireframe of the new dashboard
Click image to see larger image
Change due to user testing
2 out of 4 Providers completed the tasks but all of them said it looked too complex for what they wanted to do. One of the Providers was concerned about their staff using it and not really understanding charts and graphs because their job is to provide care and not look at charts.
Taking the feedback from the Providers, I sat down with the Product Manager and we decided to strip the provider product down to basics. Instead of providing rich information, we decided to make ease of use with basic information.
After creating the design for the new Provider product, I worked with the engineers to build the new Provider product.
Results
After 2 weeks of launching the new Provider product we saw an increase of 80% engagement compared with the old Provider product. We also helped Providers get back in contact with 75% of Seekers who initially couldn’t get through to them.
View live project
High fidelity design of provider dashboard
Click image to see larger image
