Project
In this project, I was responsible for designing INTREMED. Short for Interoperable Networking for Training Readiness and Education in Medicine, INTREMED provides a single platform for accessing training that is issued from the Defense Health Agency (DHA). It provides up-to-date information about training readiness for healthcare professionals in the Army, Navy and Air Force, and also provides data-rich visualizations to determine their progress.
Problem
There are more than 140,000 healthcare providers in different facilities under DHA who need necessary knowledge and skills to deliver quality care in the military forces. However, their training readiness process was extremely tedious and involved a lot of manual paperwork. They used multiple systems including third party learning management systems for their training, and there was no way to track them or document compliance unless the data was manually pulled, aggregated and evaluated. This made the users frustrated as there was critical information lost in the process and the lack of interoperability resulted in poor data quality.
Purpose
INTREMED would provide the platform to centralize education and training data across the DHA services into a single place. Healthcare professionals and training officers will find all necessary data in one place without the need to spend hours manually updating them. They would also have access to progress reports for all the facilities, training and individuals.
Process
As the first step, we identified potential users, systems and relevant data across different services. Through that, we established our three main users as Individuals, Service-level, and Enterprise level users. A sample of these users were then interviewed through a series of tasks and goals to capture work flows and pain points with their current user-interfaces and tools.
In the next step, we created around 8-10 personas and some user journey maps based on our users. The journey maps helped us to identify our user’s emotions while going through each step of a given task. It helped us to determine what they expected to see on the screen in contrast to what they experienced. Some samples are shown below -
Our user analysis team assisted us with the user research data and narrowed down to 10 main functionalities that needed to be addressed within INTREMED while maintaining the scope and limitations of the project.
Strategize
With the information from our analysis team, we started strategizing solutions that would best fit to address our users needs. We created a sitemap which would be the backbone of INTREMED, and would be logical and easy for the user to navigate. The sitemap below shows the information architecture for Service level users.
Our next step involved creating sketches to understand the organization and layout of information in INTREMED and finding the best way for the users to meet their goals while navigating through the platform. Before moving on to creating Hi-Fidelity prototypes, we laid down the design system, a component library with set typography, brand colors, icons and more.
Interactive Prototype
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
Based on executive and client feedback, the prototypes underwent multiple iterations before they were finalized. They were then taken for user-testing in the different locations under DHA.
User-testing
We tested our prototype with a sample of users from individual, service and enterprise levels to see how INTREMED performs in terms of usability and overall experience for the user. Some insights are presented below -
94% were able to complete all tasks
Top comments
“Like the emphasis on Over Due and Due Soon training. It helps us to understand what needs priority”
“The purple, white and yellow colors used are easy on the eyes”
“Information is presented neatly and I don’t feel overwhelmed with so much text”
Long term recommendations
“Would want to see detailed information upon clicking on a graph”
Request for customizable dashboard on home page for each level of user
Need more filters in terms of generating reports
Things I learned
The application of Design System
Creating extensive journey maps for different users
Being creative within project’s scope and limitations