Program Summary
Mars Veterinary Health is building a practice management application to support is worldwide veterinary practice and replace disparate legacy systems (one that I worked on several years before).
Type: Enterprise SaaS
Market: North America • Asia • Europe
Team: 7 Product Managers • 3 Technical Product Managers • 12 Designers • 37 Software Developers
Role On Feature: Sole Product and Visual Design • User Research • Led Design System
Timeframe: 4-month Agile rollout - 2024
Challange
Design a wholestic view to support key metrics for client accounting and patient biographics and identification including high level patient appointments and health services due.
Key Metrics
- Decrease discovery time spent to identify correct patient and diagnostics information
- Decrease discovery time spent identifing and solving wellness plan issues (key revenue metric)
- Enhance awareness of all appointments for multiple pets on an account to enhance customer service efficiency
- Enhance awareness of patient warnings and alerts
- Strengthen Accessible Compliance (WCAG 2.0)
- Increase user satisfaction sentiment to drive adoption by reducing operational friction.
Results
- >2 mins
patient account identification and diagnostics - 99%
success rate in identifing wellness issues on account in under 1 minute - 3x
faster in discovery of all patient appointments in an account - +15%
increase in success rate in discovering patient warnings
How'd I get there?
Understanding the bigger picture
Voyager Health as a SaaS supports several retail brands within the Mars Veterinary Health Business. Each brand has it's own processes, business goals, and ways to generate revenue. The largest being Brand A and Brand B with 1000s of hospital operations in the USA, Mexico, and Canada.
Aligning to stakeholder goals, the team's primary focus in phase one was on the needs of two of the retail brands. Each was using a different practice management solution and the goal was to unify each retail brand onto a single platform.
Defining the Problem
In my discovery phase I learned that the User Advocacy Team (UAT) and hospital staff users were frustrated and skipped over the account experience. It didn't offer the minimum features that they wanted that the other solutions in production offered.
Why?
- Problem 1
It missed opportunities to centralize CRM work flow by surfacing key points of information and features in one place - Problem 2
Stakeholders and Product felt the visual design was not on brand and not very engaging to generate excitement and adoption with the brands.
Legacy Experience
Why It Mattered?
- The domain is missing key features important to the Brands as measured against their work flows and needs. This will inhibit adoption.
- Business Stakeholders - There is wasted space and design lacks a visual aesthetic. There is potential to add features that would serve users and achieve our business goals.
- UAT (Subject Matter Experts)
Approach
Foundational Research and Discovery
How Does a Veterinary Hospital Operate?
Observing and interviewing hospital staff on location to understand their duties and pain points across several different sized veterinarian hospital brands.
Deep Dive on the research methodology
Putting a Plan Together
Defining Problem 1: What Features Does the Hospital Staff Need?
I started to ideate with the UAT Team (Made up of former: Client Relations Managers, Hospital Administrators, and Veterinarians), and the VP of Technology on what the Account and Patient Overview domain needed. What will make this a successful solution? We card sorted this feature set to review with users.
Developing Context Scenarios
As part of the design exploration, I created context scenarios to aid in explaining the platform features and design choices with the technical team, to align with APIs, backend coding, and set expectations for scoping.
I find after a little research and fact finding it can be fast and cheap especially now with using AI to wireframe multiple concepts with the right prompting to get a conversation going. Though for this project, I only used AI to summarize and catagorize my user research notes and user and SME responses.
Based on my research at the hospitals and consulting with the Feature PM to align with business goals we focused on these 6 features with Wellness Plans being the priority. I created an initial wireframe to start the conversation.
- Consolidate frequently referenced information in one location
- Appointment information for the account
- Wellness Plan Status Information (Main Revenue Source for 1 Brand)
- Top Level Due Items and Health Information
- Top Level Client and Financial Information
- Top Level Client Communciations
Visualizing a Layout For These 6 Features
Execution
Product Design Solution
For brevity on the Execution Journey, I am only going to focus on the Wellness Plan feature design and product solution journey. Though the wholistic design solution is shown. Contact me if you fancy diving deeper into the full case study.
Wellness Plan Feature
Accounts for 90% of revenue for one of the target brands, so information display in critical as it affects lost revenue and denial of service.
The Initial Concept (Iteration 1)
Design Choices
- Seperate tab approach given the amount of information needed to be displayed on the screen for all features
- Tab would make it scalable in the uncommon but realistic case of more than 3 patients (10% case).
- Data shown was identified as the key information a user needs
Why Discarded?
- It felt disconnected to the patient list, even though the intention was to use patient photos to connect the plan to the patient.
- Seperate tab was overkill for the 90% case just to address the 10% case
- Majority of users stated it was hidden
Moving to One Tab With Filters (Iteration 2)
Design Choices
- Moved Wellness information to the main patient list. Along with medical and insurance inforamtion.
- Added feature content to help brand understand client's value to business and revenue opportunities
- Call to Action to understand why payment is failing and if a balance is due
- Call To Action to enroll patient not on a plan to increase revenue opportunity
Why Discarded?
- Initially well recieved, but Financial PMs and UAT thought the information took up to much real estate as information is 1 click away
- Financial PMs confirmed the Credit Card information wouldn't be available to all staff for security reasons
Condensing to Expandable Cards (Iteration 3)
Design Choices
- Combined wellness and billing data with health service data on each patient card using progressive discolsure
- Added an icon to identify Wellness Plan status on Patient Card
- Simplified data points per user and product feedback rounds
Why Discarded?
- Majority of users stated the information was hidden despite not needing it all the time.
- Majority of users didn't want to make an extra action of clicking or tapping to expose.
Right Column Widget and Simplfying Content (Iteration 4)
Design Choices
- Moved Wellness to a Widget in Right Column
- Used an icon to identify Wellness Plan status on Patient Card
- Used patient photo and name to match the patient to the plan
- Minimized content to statuses originally
Result
- Majority of users and stakeholders favored the simple status approach
- Majority of users responded favorably to having wellness data visible all the time, without the need for interaction.
- Majority of users responded favorably with clicking or tapping on "All Wellness Plans" to view additional plans above 3 patients (10% case)
Visual Design Solution
Defining Problem 2: What Visual Aesthetic Will Define the Platform
While the Design System and Visual Language was a team effort, I drove four main elements.
1. The Base Visual Page Design
Headers and Columns Grid Layout (90% of UI). Light Gray Background with slight Off White Cards. This helped the development team align early in the process on page types and layouts.
2. Illustrated Patient Avatars for Quick Species Identification
Design Philosophy and Strategy: As part of the design team I helped develop our visual and experience philosophy as Clear, Concise, Respectful, and Human.
Our 5 principles guiding the Voyager Health User Experience:
- Anticipate & Augment User Needs
- Foster Trust & Peace of Mind
- Support Individual Working Styles
- Seamless Continuity & Hand Off
- Optimize Task Prep & Information Access
With a focus on WCAG and ADA Guidelines and cultural/language support in 40 International markets. We regularly engaged in design rituals with cross-discipline and user feedback reviews to iterate on the Visual Brand and Voice. In additon these legal frameworks were adhered to and affected our design strategy e.g. GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, GLBA, EFTA,
Design Mechanics: The Design System is based on Material Design constructed the Atomic Design Model. The 10 member design team was responsible for adding components to the system following established design guidelines I helped create.
3. Icon Set and Style
Standardized the Icon Set and created a Design Ritual and Guidance Documentation for team to create new icons when needed.
4. Accessibility and WCAG Guidance
- Established a Design Ritual around Accessibility Testing
- Worked with a teammate on Accessibility Documentation in Zeroheight. My contribution was the Perceivable, Operable, and Understandable pages.
Final Visual Design for Phase I
Impact
What I Accomplished (With Teamwork Support)
Driving the Product Experience and Design, I collaborated and led frequent design rituals and elicited feedback from Product, Stakeholders, and End Users to build the First Phase of the CRM Account and Patient Overview. The key was to make sure everyone was heard and we could visualize together to gain consensus.
- >2 mins
patient account identification and diagnostics - 99%
success rate in identifing wellness issues on account in under 1 minute - 3x
faster in discovery of all patient appointments in an account - +15%
increase in success rate in discovering patient warnings
Success of shipping this feature led to enhancing Voyager Health with the Hospital Dashboard feature.
Prototype
