InstaMed Online for Providers
Redesigning a digital medical billing experience from the ground up.
Duration
Mar-Aug, 2021
Role
Research, Project Manager, Final Project Book Design
Involved
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Research
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Project Management
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Wireframing
The Problem
InstaMed Online for Providers was a medical billing software solution for healthcare providers. Despite being a leading solution in the healthcare billing industry, InstaMed Online's user interface suffered from poor navigation and low visibility, which led to an overall inefficient user experience.
My UCI MHCID grad student team of six partnered with InstaMed for our final capstone project to help research and propose a redesign of InstaMed Online as they had plans to overhaul the system.
Our team was simply instructed to propose a redesign and that "the sky's the limit." So, where were we supposed to start?
The Solution
Discovery
Personal research: None of the members of our team had a healthcare background, and we needed to start off with the basics. We compiled personal research on the healthcare system and how billing typically falls into the process.
Heuristic review: We conducted a heuristic review in order to 1) understand the system, and 2) evaluate common-sense usability issues and areas for improvement.
Internal stakeholder interviews: We learned about business objectives from executive members of InstaMed's product team.
Customer interviews: We interviewed actual InstaMed customers to gain qualitative data about the perception of the system.
User testing: We conducted user testing sessions with the same customers we interviewed to observe user behaviors and learn more about usability issues.
Collaboration and team management
Our team was high-functioning and highly collaborative. I utilized Airtable to keep track of our team's progress and suggested various methods to maintain steady productivity and transparent communication:
Weekly/bi-weekly sprints, depending on the task
Frontloaded the beginning with meetings to ensure we were aligned as a team and with our clients
Assigned major milestones to individual tasks
Determined deadlines by scope and what was reasonable for everyone's schedules (most of us were still working during this program)
Split the group into research/design teams to prepare all deliverables in time
The Impact
After all the research and brainstorming sessions, our team concluded that InstaMed's greatest area for usability improvement was in the navigation experience. The InstaMed product team also admitted that navigation had gotten out of control due to years of feature bloat.
Actionable recommendations
We presented a full-scale redesign in the spirit of the initial "sky's the limit" direction we received. We redesigned nearly every major screen/tab and even proposed a new visual style guide.
But we also compiled a list of more practical, immediate recommendations that could reasonably be implemented as a business. Even though this proposal was a student capstone project, all of us were working professionals and understood the value of actionable recommendations. We categorized these recommendations into "quick wins" and "highest priorities" that the product team could consider.
Mobile-forward
InstaMed's platform was exclusively desktop-only. Understandably, the product launched during a time when mobile devices were not as common, especially in the healthcare industry. However, our user interviews revealed that many customers now desired a mobile version for convenience and quick lookups on the go. So we included new mobile designs as well, though it was never part of the scope. It presented new business opportunities for the product team to consider.
We published a book!
One of the program's final requirements was to write and publish a book of our experience. It includes our entire process and all of our final recommendations.