Medicolegal Assesments Group
Helping medical professionals complete cases
UX Research | UI Design
Summary
Medicolegal Assessments Group (MAG) connects insurance and legal companies with medical specialists to provide medical reports. For this project, our team was tasked with increasing user engagement with the doctor-facing platform, MAG Connect.
My role
I completed this client project during the immersive UX course at General Assembly over three weeks and was paired with Courtney Sue and Steven Nguyen. I played part in the whole project including research, synthesis, ideation and hi-fi prototyping on Figma.
MAG wants to reduce staff completing tasks for users
The brief focused on increasing user engagement and making the platform easier to use for medical specialists.
After meeting with the client, we uncovered exactly what the business needs were and a taste of the user problems. Overall, MAG wanted to see 20% decrease in staff completing tasks for users.
While that was the overarching goal, we established three objectives and areas to specifically guide our research:
INCREASING AVAILABILITY UPLOADS
INCREASING PATIENT ATTENDANCE UPDATES
INCREASING DICTATION & REPORT UPLOAD
Who are the actual users? Doctors or secretaries?
With a clear idea of what the goals were, we still had a few big questions with the biggest one being around who is actually using the platform?
While we initially thought we would be interviewing doctors, it turns out secretaries are the primary users of MAG Connect.
7 user interviews with a short usability test of the current MAG connect platform revealed the primary users are secretaries.
Meet Helena
After our interviews with 5 secretaries who use the MAG platform, we envisioned the primary persona to be someone like Helena.
She represents the demographics, needs, goals and pain points of all interviewees and usability testing participants.
Helena handles all of the administrative tasks at the specialist clinic she works at and finds herself managing MAG cases a few times every month. She occasionally uses the MAG Connect platform but finds it difficult to locate patients/cases which results in her contacting the MAG staff for assistance.
Helena's journey is tumultuous but MAG staff is there to help
Helena has difficulty completing tasks
Usability evaluation results
Homepage
When we asked users to show us how they would upload a dictation on the current MAG platform, we discovered:
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Clear buttons on the homepage made it seem simple to complete a task. However the lack of ordering for these buttons suggests each button is an individual action rather than a flow of steps.
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Being able to view patient and case information on the homepage was frequently suggested.
Searching for a case
After choosing to update attendance, upload dictation or upload corrected report
Key findings from this page:
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Searching for patients via the Search bar is not always successful. We suspected that this could be a backend issue.
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The status of a current case and an indication of what action is required for a case is important.
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The three dot shortcut to jump to different tasks when viewing cases was not recognisable nor used by users.
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The Drag & Drop feature is handy for users to upload files.
Helena rarely updates calendar availabilities on the platform
Usability evaluation results
Homepage
When we asked users to show us how to add an availability on the MAG Connect platform, we learnt that a majority of the users never used this function.
This is because MAG staff would email specialist clinics asking for their availabilities. As a result, secretaries were used to sharing availabilities via direct email to MAG rather than updating on the platform.
Key findings:
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All users were able to locate the "Update my availability" button.
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Users expected to see a calendar or list of appointments on the homepage.
Calendar to view appointments and add availabilities
Key findings from this page:
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The amount of colours in the legend was overwhelming and confusing.
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Attention was drawn away from the "Add new sessions" button because of the excessive colours in the legend.
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Similar to Google Calendar, users tried to add availabilities by clicking a segment on the calendar as opposed to clicking the “Add new sessions” button.
Adding availability form
After selecting "Add new sessions"
Key findings from this page:
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Completing the form is straight forward and users understood that each field was necessary. However, they thought it could be presented better - they wanted to be able to view and reference the calendar while filling in the form.
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No real-time feedback while completing the form. Users were not notified of a missing answer for a mandatory field until pressing the "Create" button.
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As revealed, MAG staff were adding availabilities on secretaries behalf. Consequently, the form lacks memorability as users (secretaries) rarely used the form.
MAG staff are highly involved in assisting users, which discourages users from using the platform.
Through interviewing and testing with our users, we decided to map out the interactions between the user and MAG via a service design blueprint.
We discovered a lot of doubling up of tasks. As outlined below, there were two ways for users to complete a task like marking attendance and uploading dictations. They could either mark attendance on MAG Connect or email attendance.
Users cannot efficiently complete patient-orentiated tasks as the platform is currently task-orientated.
1. Select a task
2. Search for patient
User flow of current task-orientated platform
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By making the platform patient-orientated and calendar more prominent, this will encourage users to complete required tasks directly on the platform.
In turn this will reduce MAGs involvement in updating availabilities and cases on behalf of the user.
What features are must-haves?
HOMEPAGE DESIGNS
First design - Bringing key info to the front
The initial lo-fi design:
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Brought the calendar to the front.
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Showcased a summary of current cases, which indicates the next step required.
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Added important case information such as case progress and case manager details.
3 usability tests with MAG users (secretaries) and 2 usability tests with medical professionals revealed:
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We got the right design! Users found it helpful having both the calendar and cases on the homepage. They were able to efficiently locate patients and immediately see the progress of each case.
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There was too much information for each patient/case block in the Current Cases section.
Second design - Refining the amount of info shown and further simplifying the calendar
For the second design, we:
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Simplified the calendar by using icons to indicate the appointment type of each slot rather than using colours.
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Reduced the amount of information show on a case block, only calling out the due date of the final report, the patients contact details and the appointment date. These were the most important pieces of information for MAG users.
PATIENT INFORMATION PAGE DESIGNS
First design - Simplifying the workflow
The initial lo-fi design:
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Simplified the workflow sections by hiding less important information.
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Grouped together all file upload related tasks such as dictations and reports.
3 usability tests with MAG users (secretaries) and 2 usability tests with medical professionals revealed:
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Amount of information show in Appointment details can be further reduced.
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Dictation uploads is not a mandatory action so file upload tasks should have independent sections.
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The progress bar should be positioned on the left, running alongside each task section.
Second design- Breaking down the required tasks
Following our usability tests with the first design, the second design focused on:
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Further reducing the amount of information and data shown for each block, particularly for Appointment Details.
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Having dictation and report uploads as it's own step rather than grouping them together.
Another round of testing with 3 MAG users and 2 medical professionals revealed:
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Specialist Payment and Case Correspondence sections are not of high importance for MAG users.
FINAL DESIGNS
🍿 Watch from start to end
Have a go yourself on the Figma prototype
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
2 medical professionals and 5 different people were able to:
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Identify case progress for a claim and complete the next required tasks
Review the calendar and add additional appointments
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View payments/invoices history
Further reccomendations
1. Conduct A/B Testing of the homepage. Originally the client wanted to prioritise increasing availability uploads on the platform's calendar. However business priorities shifted to increasing task completion which was more in-line with the users needs. To better understand what's more of a priority for users, we recommended testing one version with Current Cases at the top and the other version with the Calendar on top.
2. Directing users to MAG Connect in all email communications. As users are accustomed to completing case-related tasks by email and receiving assistance from MAG staff, we suggested that all email communications should direct users to the platform. From marking attendance to uploading a report, emails should notify and encourage users to use the platform more.
What did I learn?
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Be creative with who you can test with
As you can imagine, secretaries and medical professionals are busy. Locking in time with them for interviews and testing was tricky and encouraged me to think outside of the box on who we can test with.
Asking the right questions again and again
It was difficult getting some of the secretaries to open up. I found myself repeatedly asking "why?" in interviews to uncover the true attitudes of users.
Teamwork is key
Working as part of team to share and challenge ideas was valuable. We were able to leverage our individual strengths and weaknesses to share the workload and manage our time efficiently.
CONGRATS 🎉
You made it all the way to the bottom!
Let me treat you to a coffee ☕️
janieasencio@gmail.com