About the Company
Somnoware is a sleep disorder management platform that provides easy access to manage patients, sleep test reports and schedule patients in-lab or home tests for physicians and sleep centers. The platform also helps them increase therapy compliance – for example: identify at-risk patients, quickly diagnose them, and achieve better CPAP therapy adherence.
My Role
Lead UX/UI Design
Deliverables
UI/UX Design
High Fidelity Prototypes
Duration
6 Months
Understanding the Problem
Healthcare management is a very manual and error-prone process
The sleep disorder interpreting process is quite complicated. It requires lots of patient forms, analysis patients sleep test reports and order the medical equipment for the patients based on the sleep test reports. However, at most of the sleep centers, they are still doing the old fashion way. There are tons of paper works, manually schedule patients, interpreting sleep reports, and back and forth communication between lab manager and physicians. During the process, it's easily got errors and take a lot of time.
The somnoware web app aiming to make sleep center lab Managers and physicians’ works easier. However, It was designed from a technical perspective, with complex workflows and feature-oriented interfaces. It was not only overwhelming for the physicians, but could also be difficult to use for sleep lab manager in certain cases.
The goal was to revamp the entire web app from the ground up. I worked on this project as a lead designer, in collaboration with the product team and engineer team, to completely overhaul the site structure and functionality, and make better user interface for users' needs.
How Somnoware looked before the revamp.
Design Process
Overview
In order to tightly integrate users’ needs and feedback into our process, we scoped the project into three phases: discovery, design and production. It allowed us to invest more time on user research upfront, while still keeping the feedback loop running into the second phase through the three iterative design sprints.
Phase 1 – Discovery
Identify Existing Information Architecture
When I first started the job, the interfaces of Somnoware looked pretty complex and overwhelming to me because of its rich functionalities. In order to learn quickly, I went through the whole Somnoware app and drew out a sitemap, which was quite helpful in comprehending its structure and workflows.
In addition, by working in IA, we could quickly iterate and incorporate new features and soon produced an intuitive navigational structure that could scale and include future features.
Target Audience
Somnoware is currently used by two types of user–Sleep Physicians and Sleep Lab Manager. Physicians receive instant access to sleep test data, e-signature capability, one-click DME ordering, CPAP compliance data, and the ability to conduct end-to-end patient care management. Sleep Lab Managers can automate their complete workflow including scheduling at multiple centers, inventory management, automated reporting, therapy orders. we generalized created two personas: Brian, the medical doctor, and Jannie, the sleep center lab manager.
User Interview
In order to understand more about our target audiences’ frustrations. We visited one of our clients – Dr. Dennis Hwang, MD, who is a pulmonologist at Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center. We also met with Tri Valley Sleep Center lab managers, to see how they collaborate with Somnoware platform daily.
Design Decision
Based on the extensive research and findings from interviews with staff across the organization, we defined the design goals as follows:
- Streamline the work process and increases therapy effectiveness.
- Reduce the manual effort in the interpretation process and data collection.
- Empower lab managers and physicians to be more proactive in the interpretation process.
For physicians:
- Our solution must be simple, and doesn't require much action from them. It must improve interpretation time and streamline their work process.
- Our solution should allow physicians to monitor all status on tasks assigned, and use multiple accounts for different organizations.
- Our solution should aggregate different software they use daily into a single platform.
For sleep center lab managers:
- Our solution should give them the functionality to quickly schedule patients, and also prioritize which patient to call immediately.
- Our solution should allow them easily get the raw data from sleep studies for the interpreting physicians to review.
- Our solution should provide easy and effective communication platform with physicians and colleagues.
Phase2 – Design
Ideation
Our goal during the ideation was to generate as many unique ideas/flows as possible. We chose to pursue simple and clear user interface and flows, and have the interpretation report panel next to the patients' list all the time, which allows physicians quickly and easily to interpret. Our ideation revolved around the interpretation report on the side, because our target audience suggested that a large part of their job is to interpret the patient report from sleep studies, for example: approve, deny, or edit interpretation report.
And to design a better conceptual model for the site, we conducted a series of card-sorting. So that we are able to better organize and label navigation items, and employ the most logical structure and flows.
Prototyping
After nailing down the redesign concept, we kicked off the three iterative design sprints. Each sprint was 2 weeks long, with the first week focusing on creating new wireframes and the second week validating those concepts through 3-5 usability tests. By conducting "guerilla" usability tests, I was able to quickly identify issues with my proposed design.
New User Flow
We started with building the key use cases first, then adding more features throughout the process.
Schedule a new patient from Lab Manager
DME order from Physician
Final Design
Phase 3 – Production
During the design process, we had regular check-in meetings to make sure that our design fits into the technical constraints. We also worked with the developers to figure out what final deliverables work the best for their needs. In the end, we delivered a deck of annotated UI specs communicating interaction behaviors, as well as a visual style guide for layouts, typography, iconography, color palette.
UI Specs
Selected pages in the UI spec
The Result
After the new design released, we received great feedback from physicians and the industry. The new designs are not only increased our sale numbers but also got more attention in the healthcare industry. Last but not least, it provided the current product team with a long runway. It was fulfilling to be able to make an impact in a startup and create something that propelled the company to the next level, but at the same time, I knew that it’s just a start and there will be endless challenges ahead of us.
What I learned
Get out of the comfort zoom and learn something new.
At school, I was trained to design a visually appealing website. However, with this enterprise application design, it's not only about making it prettier. Enterprise applications typically have much greater scope and are much more complex than consumer applications, So enterprise solutions are often tailored for people working in specific roles. I taught myself how to drive a design project and conduct UX research. I paid close attention to creating a cohesive web experience, that delivers the right message to the right customers. I learned to communicate effectively with different parties, gather insights and make trade-offs.
Looking back, I think a well-defined user-centered process really helped me understand users’ needs early on, and also helped us better communicate our design rationale to our users.