Adding a feature to help expedite the onboarding process for CareRev Nurses at local medical facilities exposed critical security concerns.
CareRev is a healthcare staffing technology platform that connects healthcare professionals with shifts available at local healthcare facilities.
Before nurses can work at these facilities, they are required to complete several onboarding steps to insure patient health and safety. Conversations with facility administrators, staffing nurses, and our internal Professional Advocates (PAs) revealed that Provisioning — the process of providing credentials and badges to access health systems — was a slow, manual, and labor-intensive part of onboarding.
Having already provided well-received solutions to other parts of the onboarding process, adding a new Provisioning UI within our B2B and B2C apps was not only a logical next step for CareRev’s product team, but it was also an opportunity to reduce Provisioning times, reduce internal operations costs, and minimize security risks associated with transferring secure personal identifiable information (PII).
As Sr. Product Designer, I worked with Product Manager, Tony Gabriel, and a team of engineers to perform research, interviews, and design the first phase of the B2B Provisioning UI — as well as providing recommendations for following phases.
Originally assigned to another team, the initial discovery plan and user interviews had already been completed. Once my team took over, we continued discovery, working with our internal operations stakeholders, subject matter experts, and users to map the user journey and define the user’s “job to be done.”
CONTINUING DISCOVERY
Because another team initiated the original discovery, there was a lot of material for us to dive into. We reviewed documentation put together by the previous Product Manager, James Chasia, watched recordings of user interviews, reviewed our internal data, reviewed G-sheets used for tracking, and planned out and documented our next steps.
INTERVIEWING STAKEHOLDERS
While the initial discovery did a good job identifying the user needs, the flip side of the coin was understanding the needs of our Professional Advocates who work closely with facilities and nurses to aid the process of getting our healthcare professionals provisioned for onboarding. Through a series of interviews, we were able to understand the pain points they suffered as well.
MAPPING THE PROFESSIONAL ADVOCATE JOURNEY
As provisioning is part of the broader (and non-linear) onboarding process, we also journey mapped the onboarding process for a few of our largest customers. We learned that provisioning is handled differently in each facility, that there are a number of security issues, and that the lack of integration and machine learning is drastically slowing the entire process down.
FORMULATING THE JOB TO BE DONE
Once we felt confident that we had a solid understanding of the challenges that all parties involved faced, we put together job statements using Anthony W. Ulwick's "Jobs to be done" framework. As we discovered that there were actually 2 potential B2B user groups, we put together an overall statement, and then broke it down for each user group. We then wrote out several action-specific use cases to help map out the functionality we want to address, any challenges in doing so, and our supporting evidence.
My PM and I, both being visual thinkers, had each begun to work up wireframes and notes about design needs during our research. Working with our team of engineers, we began collaborating to devise the architecture on which we would build our new interface.
Our initial goal was to integrate the new Provisioning UI with the other onboarding tools. However, as we began to design for this, it quickly became apparent that our app’s existing navigation structure, combined with tech debt, was going to be an obstacle to implementing the ideal experience.
So, while I was able to ideate on what a future states may look like, we were forced to plan out a phased approach which would give us time to get valuable feedback on specific aspects of the user experience with the initial rollout, while also providing engineers time to update our internal app structure to facilitate future iterations.
After reviewing wireframe concepts with our product team and various stakeholders, we were able to narrow down our approach. Using components from the Figma design sytem* allowed us to quickly move from wireframe concept to hi-fi mockups of various use cases and a prototype walkthrough.
* Shortly after being hired at CareRev, I took it upon myself to create a temporary design system in Figma until an official design system could be created. Focused on the B2B app, I created a single repository for our various styles & components along with instructions for their us. This allowed all of our B2B product designers to maintain a more consistent user experience.
After the first pass at hi-fi mocks, we were able to get our prototype concept in front of two of our potential beta-customers. Both customers responded positively and were open to trying out the new UI and providing their input.
Working with my PM, Tony, we demonstrated the new concept for Hiring nurses at both New Bergan hospital and St. Joseph's hospital. Both participants expressed that the interface seemed intuitive at first glance and they were both excited to try it.
Additionally, their feedback resulted in the addition of a link to allow Hiring nurses to download the candidate nurse's credentials directly from the Provisioning UI and additional automated checks being added to the internal software our Professional Advocates use when determining which CareRev professionals to submit for Provisioning.
While the engineers are closely involved in the design process, I prefer to provide comprehensive notes to aid engineers during implementation. At CareRev, our Product team's process involved creating documentation in Figma, as well as uploading files and detailing flows in Zeplin.
In Figma, my preferred system is to have a separate documentation page using a color-coded notation system to indicate animations, interactions, styles, and use cases which need special explanation. I have it on good authority that this was very much appreciated by my engineers as I was laid-off during the implementation process and they were able to use my detailed notes to complete the project.
The initial plan for rolling out the final product was to release the Phase 1 Provisioning UI to the two beta customers for whom we were able to collect and provide the salient data. The product team would then be able to track its performance in Amplitude to pull data, in addition to performing surveys and interviews post-release to determine the success of the new UI. As the product was not released until recently, impact has yet to be determined.
This project really drove home just how important it is to utilize your Operational stakeholders for their expertise, as well as revealing how even a security-conscious company like CareRev, needs to be continuously vigilant in securing their customer’s information.
While CareRev is still in the process of collecting usage data since it's release to our first beta customer, the feedback has been very positive thus far. Brenda Bariteau, Sr Employee Experience Coordinator for St Josephs, had this to say, "I love it! Its even more than what I expected from discussing it with you before."
