Homeland Health Specialists

Background

Homeland Health Specialists (HHS) is a healthcare organization that facilitates and provides healthcare services such as vaccinations and wellness events to organizations and individuals across the United States.

Last year, HHS recognized the need for a complete overhaul of their existing custom-built admin + staff portal, as it had become cumbersome for their staff to use and was not meeting the evolving needs of their workforce and clients. In addition to this re-imagined internal tool, their team also sought to update their public-facing website to be launched in tandem with the staff portal in anticipation of their busy season in the fall.

Overview

Client: Homeland Health Specialists
Project Duration: 4 months (January 2023 to April 2023)
Project Team: A multi-disciplinary team including a UX designer (my role), 6 developers, 2 product owners and various stakeholders from HHS.
Tech Stack: Figma, NextJS, Strapi, Tailwind CSS

Goals & Objectives

• Enhanced User Experience: Improve the overall user experience for HHS admin + field staff, making it easier to access information and perform essential tasks like business account management, appointment scheduling, and timesheet management.
• Efficiency and Productivity: Increase staff productivity by streamlining workflows and reducing time spent searching for and entering information in their CRM.
• Flexibility and scalability: Ensure that the new portal is scalable and built on a platform that can accommodate future development with HHS in the midst of rapid growth in their organization.

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Discovery

After considering the project requirements, the team decided on a dual-track agile approach, ensuring close collaboration between all members of the project team, and providing the proper focus and attention for each of the wide-ranging features and functional requirements for the portal.

This began with a thorough research and discovery phase, during which I led the team in :

• Reviewing an MVP document prepared by HHS staff outlining the design + functionality of their existing portal, the various pain points associated with its use, and their initial vision for desired solutions.
• Conducting interviews with HHS staff to further understand their requirements and pain points, such as tedious workflows with content management and staff communication, gathering multiple stakeholder perspectives in the process.
• Working with Tailwind CSS to create consistency between design + development, provide the development team with a set of clear reference points to aid in communication throughout the project, and allow for more efficient iterative design and development.

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Design

Based on the insights gathered during the initial discovery phase, we learned that there would need to be a slightly different approach to designing for admin + office staff members and field staff. The admin + office staff tended to be more technologically confident + competent and had more consistent access to training resources, whereas field staff were less comfortable with modern web interfaces and would require more context clues like tool tips and clear, descriptive text explainers within features.

After aligning to this understanding, we dove into our design process, which included:

• Developing and documenting user flows based on personas developed for each user type and the primary tasks they need to accomplish while using the portal.
• Creating information architecture documentation to organize the portal's structure and content within.
• Leading feature-based rapid prototyping activities with the client in Figjam to test assumptions about use cases, and produced a design framework that would allow development to get started quickly.
• Producing hi-fidelity designs + prototypes in Figma to review internally with the development team before presenting to the client in our sprint review sessions.

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Impact

The rebuilding of the Homeland Health Specialists staff portal demonstrates the positive impact that a user-centered approach to UX and development can have on an organization. By understanding the needs of their staff and leveraging modern technology, HHS now has a powerful, user-friendly portal that supports their mission to provide high-quality healthcare services.

As a designer, my experience reinforced several ideas:

1. Involving end-user perspectives and feedback in the design process is crucial for success.
2. Clear communication with all stakeholders, frequent testing of features, and utilizing efficiencies such as UI frameworks to increase velocity are essential when taking an iterative approach to design and development.
3. The same interface won’t be intuitive to use for every type of user, and we can lean on additional tools + design elements to ensure we are developing that meets users wherever they are.