New Product for Healthcare Software Leader

The client acquired three mature products serving community age care and disability providers. The Commonwealth government is making significant structural changes to the aged care and disability sectors with a goal of reducing cost and increase client centricity. The client decided to introduce a replacement next-generation cloud-based product designed to reduce costs and increase customer-centricity of the aged care and disability providers and their clients.

In a two-person discovery team, I evaluated the desirability, viability, and feasibility of a feature backlog, with the goal of prioritizing features on the roadmap for beta and the actual launch of the product. Once the features were clearly articulated and prioritized within MVP scope, they were handed across to a design delivery team for high fidelity design and writeup of user stories.

Design of the NDIS Customer Onboarding Process

In a series of two-week design sprints, I conducted user interviews and on-site contextual enquiry for our initial discovery on how the potential MVP providers onboard their NDIS clients. Taking the learnings from these interviews, an initial hypothesis was developed as a user flow with sticky notes in a team workshop.

From there, low-fidelity wireframes were designed and flow prototype created. The prototype was then remotely tested with other providers for new learnings and to validate the original learnings. The UI elements were documented and an onboarding customer journey map created.  

This material was passed over to a UI designer who completed high-level mock-ups for the scrum delivery team. A similar process was repeated for the provider’s aged care clients, with the goal of understanding the differences between the disability and aged care needs.

Design of the Product’s CRM and Financial Rating Engine

We interviewed product owners, lead developers, trainers, and sales consultants who deal with three existing products within the company to understand customer feedback on the customer pain points around services and financial rating.

The feedback was that the sales features of the product needed to more discrete from the financial rating features of the products. A major pain point was identified where the customer-facing staff within providers needed to be able to offer a service, without having to understand the complexity of the financial rating that may underlie it.

We initially built a hypothesis around how the providers would structure their services, tasks, and how we could separate this from the financial rating through automation. From whiteboard conceptual diagrams were evolved to entity relationship diagram explaining how the different objects within the solution would connect. We validated the solution design for feasibility with solution architects within the business.

The product entity design was further fleshed out, and new attributes and features added, and low fidelity mock-up and draft user stories developed. Through this design, we eliminated the need for the provider’s customer-facing staff to see a user interface.

A similar process was followed for government reporting processes. The providers, in this case, had a pain point around the customer-facing staff entering information correctly. This impacted funding budget and payment by the government. Again, the solution sought to automate this functionality, so that customer-facing staff no longer needed to enter data.

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Research Insights and User Flow

These are examples of physical artifacts from customer onboarding. These show research insights and an early customer journey story map. (Images intentionally blurred.)

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Early Architecture Design

Below are examples of the early iterations of the solution architecture for the service and rating functions of the product. Using design thinking and lean experimentation these were evolved through constant feedback. The architecture maps the mental model of users and stakeholders.

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Wireframes

Early stage low and medium fidelity prototypes of the customer onboarding process were used to test initial hypothesis’. The user feedback invalidated the first hypothesis around when and how providers capture and enter client data, leading to a change of approach. Image below of an images of the wireframes involved in the early prototypes.

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