Key Problems & Solutions

Physicians find having to call coordinators for changes inconvenient

New users don’t understand information displayed 

Physician and coordinator views are not optimized for common tasks   

Users can’t find the global navigation

Project Scope & Constraints

Pre-existing User Group

From user interviews we learned that our patient assignment application was limited to our physician’s group and not applicable to other hospitals due to differences in culture and existing processes. 

Focus on Existing Views

We also learned that while physician and coordinator workflow would be streamlined having a single source for patient information and not having to toggle between different applications, there were cost limitations preventing integration/migration off historical software. Therefore, our focus was on making what was already there better vs. developing new views. 

User Personas

From our user interviews, I created the following personas: 

Solving Key Problems

1 - Giving Physicians More Control

From our research, physicians complained about having to call coordinators for updates. Even though the intention was to prevent physicians from abusing the system, having coordinators as a gatekeeper was creating additional work for both physicians and coordinators and causing system inaccuracies since physicians would not always report their changes due to the hassle. 

To resolve this issue I added the following features:

Patient Reassignment

Enable physicians to request patient reassignment and receive notifications when reassigned

DESIGN ITERATIONS

Physicians Prefer To Communicate Directly 

My initial design had coordinators approving the reassignment request but after talking to physicians and coordinators in testing it was clear that this was not the desired interaction. Physicians were already communicating about reassignments with each other and did not want the coordinator as a middleman. I updated the design so that reassignment requests and approvals were between physicians.

Two Way Reassignments  

Another piece of feedback I got from testing was that physicians often picked up patients for other physicians. This usually happened when a physician had extra bandwidth at the start of their shift or when only seeing pediatric patients. I updated the design to include a “Pick Up” button in the All assignments view so physicians could request patients to be assigned to themselves.

Status Update

Enable physicians to update their own status

Enabling Status Change

The original design showed a disabled status toggle which confused many physicians who tried to click on it. In the mid fidelity design, I enabled the status toggle in a new section called “My Stats.” Feedback from usability testing suggested that the “My Stats” panel was redundant and physicians preferred a simplified view so I moved the status update location to a menu under the physician’s name in the high fidelity design.

Creating Distinct Physician States

I wanted to resolve the confusing system display vs. behavior issue discovered in heuristic evaluation. The original status toggle had an “On” and “Off” option, implying the user was “Available” or “Not Available.” However, this was an oversimplified view as the user could be “Off” and in “Procedure” but available for less complex assignments and appearing in the “Up Next” queue. To reduce confusion, I created 4 distinct user specified states: Available, Procedure, CODE, and Unavailable.

2 - Creating Clear Labels and State Indicators

During research we discovered that the application had a high learning curve for new users, who struggled with understanding what the application was doing. They lacked context, confused by unclear labeling, missing units, and physician state indicators. 

I included the following updates to clarify:

3 - Create role specific, simplified views 

The usability walkthrough revealed that the physician and coordinator views were not optimized for their common tasks.

Physicians primarily used the application to see their position in queue/estimate time until next patient and verify their assignments. However, their default view required them to scan through the upcoming queue for their position and showed all patient assignments. To make it easier to use, I highlighted the physician’s information in queue and included their position number. I also defaulted the assignment’s view to be physician specific so physicians do not have to scan through other physician’s assignments.

Coordinators primarily used the application to add assignments and help physicians update status. The usability walkthrough revealed that coordinators are not interested in physician stats.