A healthcare data privacy platform to protect patient information during medical research
The business challenge:
Due to the complex nature of both customer patient data and technical hashing processes, our company support teams were too often tasked with acting as user proxies for most platform interactions. A switch to managing customer data in the cloud gave us an opportunity to create a new experience that could be more supportive of self-service transactions and take the pressure off our small support team.
The user problem:
Target users were resistant to adopting the current system and we weren’t sure why, so we needed to understand more about their wider context before redesigning the data management experience.
Approach:
Discovery research to capture the target user journey, in and outside our product experience to gather tasks, pain points, modes of interaction and collaborators.
Generative prototype creation and iterative testing to explore ways to address motivation and interaction problems
A live pilot program over several months to assess the new experience over time, to prioritize next stage work and finalize quant measures
Insights
Research revealed that roles assigned to these workflows were not as technical or data savvy as we originally assumed, and often had little context of how our platform supported their goals. This introduced breakdowns in momentum early on, and since the work was so sensitive, the default action was to call our company support to intervene and take on the risk.
Outcome
We designed the new experience to connect early on to the user’s goal, and provided context along the way for each step. Technical interactions (like writing SQL queries to explore dataset criteria) offered support structures to help users complete tasks accurately and with less risk. Status updates were added to dashboards to give the user a reason to re-engage meaningfully.