The project initially began with Scrum Master, Solution Architect, Sr. Product Strategist, and UX Designer. After several initial meetings with our client, we identified two project tracks—modernization of the existing tool and feature exploration & experience updates. As the project needs grew, we additional team members rounding out UXR and Product for this engagement. My role on the project solidified as working on the modernization track of the existing iRound application. To that end, I worked closely with the UX Researchers to construct interview and usability test questions and heuristics, while leveraging both the product strategy and solution development sides of the project to ensure the technical feasibility of any given changes.

Working closely with the UX Researchers on the team and leveraging the stakeholders and users Press Ganey could put us in contact with, we collectively completed 17 stakeholder interviews (of which I conducted 2 and participated in 12), one on-site contextual inquiry with 5 participants, and 12 user interviews (of which I participated in 8), for a total of 34 research participants. The research schedule and access were greatly influenced by the time of year (the winter holidays and New Years affecting the availability of participants), and those having available time in the demanding work culture of healthcare.

To see the full body of research we conducted, please press the button below.

Because the scale of use and niche of specific tasks performed by different users at different hospitals, we decided to break the research and user persona groups into actor profiles with corresponding jobs or actions to take while interacting with patients, other hospital staff, and importantly, the iRound application itself.

After a few rounds of research and a innovation session with the client, we determined these four main actor profiles to divide the customer journey.

The modernization efforts which I designed mostly focused on the Leadership Rounder and Delegated Rounder actor profiles. The Administrator and Data Analyst actor profiles were prioritized second based on business need, access to interview subjects, timeline constraints, and design judgement based on immediate benefit with minimal technical changes.

In an effort to understand all of the updates needed to the current design system, I performed a manual UI audit of iRound, consolidating the results to share out with external stakeholders. This audit showed the large number of inconsistencies in the existing platform's design and also tried to show scale-of-effort of modernizing the UI.

Based on immediate need, stakeholder interviews, and pain points identified through research, we worked to modernize the iRound application. Additionally, within the previous year, Press Ganey updated their other suite of products to a unified style guide. This acquired product of iRound had yet to be customized to match the rest of the suite of products. Toward that end, I broke the application down screen-by-screen to visually update each interaction and flow within the iRound application.

Working closely with the UX Researchers on the team and leveraging the stakeholders and users Press Ganey could put us in contact with, we collectively completed 17 stakeholder interviews (of which I conducted 2 and participated in 12), one on-site contextual inquiry with 5 participants, and 12 user interviews (of which I participated in 8), for a total of 34 research participants. The research schedule and access was greatly influenced by the time of year (the winter holidays and New Years affecting the availability of participants), and those having available time in the demanding work culture of healthcare.

We worked diligently to meet client needs, but often level setting with the client on what was possible given tight timelines proved difficult. We had to quickly dissect and prioritize needs, many of which were unknowns because there was previously no user research done on the application itself. Similarly, I initially felt lost on where to start because there were many competing priorities from the stakeholder interviews, which we conducted before the user interviews. Ultimately, reworking the interface to update some flows, organization of links, and visual design proved to be the first step towards modernizing the application. Although Press Ganey didn’t end up signing a second statement of work (COVID intervened), we had a clear direction on the future feature improvements we wanted to integrate which we presented at the final readout.