WellSky's healthcare software supported a wide range of users, jobs, and workflows. Testing a product like this required more than checking whether someone could find a button or complete a single task. A single product could support countless workflows across many different types of users, each with different needs and goals.
At the same time, our UX research team was helping Product and Engineering become more lean. Instead of making large 6–12 month bets, we were encouraging teams to break complex products into smaller pieces that could be built, tested, and improved in 2–4 week cycles.
Doing that well required close collaboration with Product and Engineering to identify which parts of the product were most valuable to tackle first. This project was one of those opportunities.
The team was developing a new mobile application for hospice nurses working in the field, often in areas with unreliable internet connectivity. The application needed to support both online and offline use while helping nurses complete critical tasks on the road.
The prototype needed to support workflows including:
The challenge was determining whether these workflows were usable enough to move forward and identifying where the team needed to focus its design and development effort.
In-lab, semi-structured workflow usability test. This was the inaugural study in the company's UX lab that my manager and I designed and had built.
I designed and conducted an in-lab, semi-structured workflow usability study using a coded prototype.
This was also the inaugural study in the company's new UX research lab, which my manager and I had designed and helped build.
Rather than testing isolated screens, I focused on the end-to-end workflows nurses would need to complete in the field. This allowed us to identify which parts of the experience were working and which needed further design attention before the team invested more time building them.
Just as importantly, I involved developers directly in the research process. This was the first usability test, remote or live, that developers had participated in, giving them an opportunity to see usability problems firsthand and connect research findings directly to their work.