I was assigned to improve the user experience of a web-based application that allows hospital managers to schedule and communicate with their staff. All designs were to fall outside of the application's main functionality.

Goals

• Gather insights into current user pain points.
• Produce designs that address user's most critical pain points.
• Reach consensus with stakeholders over plans of action.
• Steer away from producing any designs that would require more than tweaks to any apis the application consumes.

Firstly, I reached out to book two staffing manager users for interviews and usability testing. I then read through user help queries that spanned back three years.

I was able to isolate those which I considered to be "user issues."

User issues

• 34% of issues were down to a lack of understanding of the application's capabilities.
• 17% were navigation errors.
• The rest were system bugs or hard to label.

I would be able to draw upon this data for the upcoming usability testing and interviews. Capturing this information would also be beneficial when measuring outcomes.

User interviews

User interviews and usability testing took place in the workplaces of the staffing managers. Both were female nurses that had ended up working in a staffing office to move away from working actively in nursing. The users ranged between 40 and 55 in age. Both have a close working knowledge of the staff they manage. They use the internet frequently outside of work, for social media and consuming video entertainment.

Applications and websites they use on a regular basis inside and outside of work were - Google chrome, Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, WikiPedia, Amazon, HubSpot and various news websites.

Both users found last-minute work cancellations of staff to be the most stressful part of their job. Both found they had less than adequate time to accomplish all their tasks within their role. Each user estimated they spend between 90 - 270 minutes per day solving issues related to last-minute changes in staff members' schedules.

Usability testing

• Users completed tasks that touched on core functionality quickly and without friction.
• Secondary tasks were an issue. Both users struggled to produce a custom report. One of the users relied upon pen a paper to write down and record events.
• Both users struggled to complete tasks when the task involved the user having to scroll up or down.
• Both users struggled when describing the application's terminology clearly.
• Both users expressed frustration when trying to roll back actions they had made.
• One of the users noted some frustration as they described how they felt when using the filters on a particular data table.
• One of the users struggled to maintain awareness of recent activity on the application and opted to refresh pages frequently.

Benchmarking (#1.1)

I benchmarked the application against several direct competitors within the market, several widely used applications with similar user goals, and some popular sites that came up during the user interviews.

• Navigation and information architecture were more logical on other systems. The application had navigational links that were ordered by the dates they were developed as opposed to having much structure or priority.
• The application compared poorly with regards to the use of a cohesive style and incorporated more of a miss match of look and feel.
• Secondary functionality was presented in a nonstandard manner. For example, the way in which your produce reports or charts could differ from section to section.
• Terminology was more readily understandable on competitors' software.