Clinical Partners
Overview
Defining and improving a platform built with the Salesforce CMS for clinicians and patients to book and host therapy sessions through Zoom video calls.
Responsibilities
User testing, research, conducting demos, wireframing, prototyping and interface design.
Year
2020 - 2021
Location
Remote (London)
About
Clinical Partners is one of the UK’s leading providers of mental health services. They work both privately and with the NHS to help people and families experiencing mental and emotional difficulties to get better.
The Problem
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Clinicians needed a user-friendly, accessible way to conduct their sessions with their patients. Under normal circumstances, this would have been done face to face but because of the pandemic, live video chat was the next best thing. Because of the urgency, the platform was built using standard Salesforce components which are not very user friendly and caused several pain points for the user experience for both clinicians and patients.
The Team
I was the Lead UX and UI Designer working with a team of two Front-end Developers, five Back-end Developers and a Product Lead.
Familiarise
Since development had already begun when I arrived, some compromises and limitations had to be considered. I began by understanding the product, clarifying initial assumptions, uncovering user pain points, and gathering insights.
Wireframes and Understanding
For the first few weeks, I familiarised myself with the platform in its BETA form. I also studied the wireframes that the stakeholders had produced to understand their way of thinking, their goal and their perception of the final product.
At this point, most of the correspondence was done by the triage team via email and phone calls to connect the Clinicians and their patients. This left a lot of room for errors.
I researched and benchmarked other competitors in the same sector, in addition to reading customer reviews and feedback which helped to provide qualitative research and further understand the user’s needs and expectations based on affordances.
Interpret
First, I summarised the knowledge gathered about the users into variously estimated personas, after which I traversed through the user’s journey, and identified pain points at each stage. For example, I considered:
Do we need a search bar on the home screen for patients?
Could patients benefit from having a profile section with some limited control?
What was the best way to resolve patient queries? The Clinical Partners contact telephone number had previously been used, even though resources were limited resulting in long waiting times and negative trust pilot reviews.
Research
After familiarising myself with the product there were some clear issues, however, conducting in-depth research for better understanding was key.
In-Depth Interviews and Usability Testing
Trust pilot reviews played a big part in helping understand the current frustrations with the processes; this helped align the goals with the wider team.
To further understand where the pain points were stemming from, I conducted in-depth interviews with the triage team and clinicians. Neither party had seen or used the portal at the time. So I structured the interviews by firstly talking about their current roles and experiences for the first half of the interview. This provided a lot of detail and understanding of what we needed to prioritise from both a patient and clinician perspective; patients require the portal to be user-friendly and considerate of their delicate mental health, whereas clinicians purely need it to be efficient.
For the second half of the interview, I introduced the portal to the users with several tasks set out. From the patients’ side of things, the feedback was more opinion-based depending on previous requests that the triage team were used to receiving. Feedback on the clinicians portal was very intriguing because aesthetics were almost not mentioned; most of the feedback was priority and efficient based.
Card Sorting and Affinity Diagrams
After conducting several interviews, I had a card sorting session with the Product Lead. With the country being in lockdown, I could not host a workshop with the wider team but I managed to have a video call with the development team where we had an open discussion about the feedback with each member providing their thoughts on it. We replayed the interviews and started an affinity diagram from the feedback notes we had taken.
The main takeaways that were the highest priority were:
The standard Salesforce calendar format was not very user-friendly and lacked clear instruction.
The appointment list view was very confusing and needed the ability to filter the categories.
Zooms links in both portals were not clear to the users.
The patient mobile portal needed much improvement as a high level of patients would be accessing it from a mobile device for privacy reasons.
Clinicians seemed less concerned with the design but were more concerned with functionality and how this would improve their day to day workload.
Talking to the development team also helped me understand the capabilities and restrictions of Salesforce as a CMS and which APIs we could integrate to improve the portal experience. This gave me some clarity on my future design thinking.
Problem Framing
Communication
Most feedback from the patients was about the lack of general communication with the triage team or communication which confused them. Patients also needed clear communication in language and tone of voice that was considerable.
Accessible
The Usability Tests indicated that the portals did not meet the best accessible standard for users. Users struggled to attain information on some sections from either lack of chunking and priorities not being clear. The standard Salesforce components were also not aesthetically pleasing to the eye which meant a lot of the components will need to be re-design and custom-built.
Priorities
The research let me locate the pain points the users were facing and what needed prioritising. Most patients will be accessing the portal to access their Zoom Link for a session with their Clinician. This meant that the Zoom link needed to be prioritised and appear almost instantly when a patient logs in. Clinicians seem to spend more time on the calendar planning their sessions and arranging their availability. This meant the calendar component needed to be efficient and easy to use.
Prototype & Design
Now that the initial research phase was complete, I gathered all the information I had collected
over the past weeks and began mocking up some prototypes.
Portal Audit and Clean Up
Instead of building a completely new platform, we decided to work on improving the current BETA portal that had been built. Although the feedback from the research was not great, some good components had already been built that just needed slight improvements.
Design Systems
Whilst auditing the platform, the marketing team was working on a rebrand for the brand and I decided it was necessary to collaborate with them on creating a design system that was kept in line with the new brand guidelines keeping all channels consistent.
User Interface and Component Design
The main priority was designing a user-friendly interface for the Patient Portal that prioritised the needs of the user with components that consider efficient functionality and accessibility.
This was mainly achieved by affordances from universal design systems the general public are accustomed to. From the research gathered we prioritised:
Outstanding action prompts that need immediate attention to proceed with appointments.
A more accessible list view component that is simple to navigate.
Viewing upcoming appointments on the homepage.
Adding a Zoom link in the list view for quick access to the appointment.
Including a “Book Appointment” call to action in the header on the desktop interface and in the menu on the mobile interface.
Defining New User Journeys
Because of the existing face to face business model, there was a lot of room for experimentation with the best practices for some of the user journeys. Most of the user flows were formulated with reference to competitor benchmark research which I had done earlier.
The most notable journeys that took some fine-tuning from User Testing were:
The “Book Follow Up Appointment” flow.
Patient questionnaire form filling.
Clinician report filling which featured 13 unique reports with different formats depending on the subject matter.
Patient and clinician email onboarding flow
More Screens
Conclusion
The design process never ends, but we need to continue our pursuit of perfection by improving the product consistently.
Reflect
Looking back at the product from where it started to where it currently is, I can say I am extremely proud of myself and the rest of the team for achieving what we have achieved given the time and Covid-19 circumstances.
The product team was always quick to react when any problems came up and they were always open to fresh ideas and discussions to improve the product and work processes.
Challenges
The challenge I had with the product wass the lack of Patient User Testing for the patient side of the portal. Given that most of the patients we were building the product for were of a delicate mental state, we had to be considerate about how we approached and requesed user testing. Most of the research and feedback was second hand from the triage team who dealt with the patients through phone calls and emails.
Future Planning
The portal has launched with many positive responses and praise. However, there is still so much room for improvement. Like I mentioned before, we still need to dive deeper and get a better understanding of how patients are responding to the product. A/B testing, customer surveys and journey mapping will be key to the growing success of this product.