Visualizing a New Approach to Veterinary Care for VCA Animal Hospitals

Project Summary

What was asked?

VCA wanted to create a wholistic hospital operations application with a modern visual user interface and implement new line of business features to create the premiere patient care portal for their 400+ veterinary hospitals.

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What I did?

Understand the pain points of the hospital staff as they provide patient care and support services
Modernize the patient care portal to reduce training time and mitigate pain points
Create a scalable design system that could accommodate new features and requirements
Develop a UX process that could guide design and product best practices
Earned promotion to User Experience Architect

Challenge

User Success

Reduce discovery and learning curve
Streamline workflow by reducing number of actions to complete a task
Reduce mistakes in overbookings for boardings

Business Success

Increase confidence with the UX process
Reduce training and overhead costs
License app to other Veterinarian hospitals

Approach

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 hospitals.

Deep Dive on the research methodology

Hospital Observations

Onsite visits

Myself
Design colleague (occasionally)
Technical Product Manager (occasionally)
Product Stakeholder (occasionally)

The onsite visits involved a mix of observational studies and interviews at different times of the day. The observational times were suggested to us to get a sense of opening and closing duties, the morning rush pet drop off and the afternoon rush pet pickup times.

3 panel hand drawn comic strip: Panel 1: A cat is sleeping on a countertop. Panel 2: The cat wakes up and jumps on a keyboard surprising the recpetionist. Panel 3: The computer shuts off, the receptionist is dismayed. — True Story: Cat jumping on a keyboard causing the computer to shut off without work saved

Observation Methodology

Deep diving into the hospital setting to observe the various interaction touchpoints between customers, pets, and hospital staff was one of the best ways to learn and begin the process of making the software easier to learn and use.

My first impressions were how quickly a calm moment can errupt into chaos in the waiting area, dogs barking, cats reacting, and the emotional toll losing a pet can take.

What happens the moment the patient comes in the door?
How are the human and animal greeted?
What are the steps of the check in process?
What happens during a rushed drop off and leave?
What does a boarding involve?

UX Thought: Environment Matters

A couple of the most memorable findings reinforcing how busy and unpredictable a veterinary hospital can be.

Finding 1

While one of my visits in the reception area there was this cat sleeping on the counter. Then it suddenly jumped down onto the receptionist's keyboard and wiped out the patient notes she was typing up and knocked the screen over and sent the keyboard to the floor.

Finding 2

In the chaotic waiting room, I observed a family without a pet waiting after checking in and they were visibly distraught for several minutes. The doctor appeared and took them into a side room and delivered the bad news that their pet had passed away. The receptionist suggested that the new application should have a way to identify patients and clients in this situation so that staff can react quickly and take the appropriate action such as move them quickly to the bereavement area.

Finding 3

Dogs enjoy a slight advantage over cats, and both account for most medical appointments as compared to other types of pets. Dog boarding and grooming appointments is significantly higher than cats and other pets.

User and Audience Interviews

Interview Methodology

I selected two diverse participants that varied in tenure (where possible) within each of the five main operational areas at the five hospitals for interviews. We also conferred with two former hospital staff (receptionist, and a retired veterinary doctor) that were professional trainers at the corporate offices.

Interview Process

Created baseline interview questions for the team
Observe their daily tasks and how they interact with clients, patients, and current technology, what does it take to board an animal, how pets are treated and managed
Each interviewer took notes from their interviews and we grouped answers into an affinity board
We asked technical, aspirational, and emotional questions like

What is the most important aspect of a boarding?
What is one part of your job you would change? What would you change about it?
How would you create the opportunity for a personal touch?
How do you handle clients who are dissatisfied with the boarding?
Have you had a bad experience with a patient/boarder? What did you do?
How do the doctors and medical technicians feel about data entry?

Empathy Mapping with Personas

Our personas were created from a team effort between members of the VCA product and subject matter expert team, Akanksha, and myself. We used a mixture of data from our interviews, the product teams knowledge of operations, and job roles within the hospital.

* It is worth noting that on this project we enjoyed insitutional support for our personas.

Brianna

They are under 30, love animals, and looks at the job as temporary, yet a mostly enjoyable position.
They sometimes have the ambition to become a vet and they love learning new things.
They are frustrated with constant phone calls and people coming in, loud pets, dissatisfied clients, and occasionally colleagues.
They find the current software system boring, due to a lack of visual UI, and want whatever the new system is to be easier to learn.

Rose

They are under 30, love animals, and looks at the job as a career. They will leave to make more money and most want to become a veterinarian.
They perform a lot of the medical tasks and are responsible for the boarding area and care.
They are frustrated mostly with the work load and are emotionally invested into the patients they see frequently.
They want the system to be faster to learn and reduces any work interruptions. If it can read their minds, that would be ideal.

Further Personas

We created additional personas for a veterinary doctor, groomer, office manager, a business client (shelter/pound), a feline patient, and a new all critter patient. The latter represented the more complex yet edge case patient profile and associated business requirements.

Patient Journey Map

Documenting pet owner touchpoints and how a patient (pet) moves through the hospital in a boarding scenario.

Two Types of Pet Owners

The Runaway:

This client is trying to beat traffic or possibly flee the country. They come in and want to hand off their pet as soon as possible. They may cut the line, may be aggressive or agitated, and may just abandon their pet without properly checking in.

The Melancholic:

This client has a hard time letting their pet go. They may ask a lot of questions, may give a long list of care instructions, and may require reassurance, extra attention, and might need a nudge out the door to get on.

Pet Journey Map

After the pet is greeted and checked in they are moved to where they will be boarded. The location of the pet is important throughout the stay.

Outlining the Boarding Problem Statement

Hospital staff finds the current system tedious and limiting in functionality based on their current job responsibilities in providing accurate boarding quotes, determining boarding capacity, and efficiently identifying and checking in boarders and tracking their personal belongings and care schedule.

Wireframing

Solving one of the main problems that of stakeholder confidence in the overall UX process. I utilized a form of Lean UX principles to rapid design and prototype possible design solutions on a whiteboard.

Early Boarding Iterations

Curious to see the methodology and problems I was attempting to solve in greater detail?

Figure A1: Smart Sense Cage Suggestion Feature

Figure B1: Additional Upsells and Services Exploration

Figure C1: Boarding Booking Combined Wireframe Early Concept

Example Use Cases

Ability to see accounting or medical matters to inform Paul
Ability to see an inventory of all available cages
Ability to book an existing pet or a new pet
Ability to look up a client to see if they exist and see associated patients
Ability to upsell and add additional services

Missed opportunities:

Lacked insight into situational awareness to visualize cage availability over a specified time frame without having to select a date range first
Lacked insight into what cages are overbooked and waitlisted
Lacked insight into what types of cages are best suited for a particular pet type

Figure D1: Wireframe of visual schedule of cage availability by week

The rapid whiteboarding sketches in figures A1, B1, C1, D1 helped clarify a lot of questions and flesh out requirements rather quickly. An added benefit was any member fo the cross discipline team could walk by and look at the whiteboard and ask questions with a post-it or a marker.

The ability to execute on this from my experience across several different projects lies within the strength of the cross-discipline team, and how deeply stakeholders want to get into the design weeds.

Whiteboard to Prototype

Iterating on the design through usability testing with Brianna and Rose achieved the goals of reducing the learning curve and speed of getting the information they needed. Iterating on the missed opportunities like total cage capacity over a day/week/month at a glance and cage placement suggestions the user was able to accurately and quickly get a boarding price quote to a customer through fewer interactions.

Paul and his partner Karina want to get away for the weekend, so they call VCA to price shop on boarding 2 of their 3 pets. Brianna queries Woofware to determine the availability and the price for the two pets and inquires if they are existing clients. Paul and Karina agree to book the boarding.

Bringing It All Together

Tasked Based Storytelling Through Protoyping

To test the design solution with users and for stakeholder review; I used Balsamiq as the defacto prototyping tool. The video incoporates further iteration and demonstrates one way Brianna could use Woofware to accomplish the task outlined in the following scenario.

Download a Transcript of the Screen Names and Steps

Impact

Design Process Summation

With the delivery successes and increased client confidence I was able to reduce the need to travel to the client site from four days a week to once every two weeks.

Results

Woofware Phase 1 was released into five hospitals on schedule as a three-month Beta test to measure how well we accomplished our goals in the complexity of real life situations. It was then rolled out into the 400 hospitals. In the middle of the Beta, I earned a second promotion to become the UX Practice Manager for iLink Digital Inc. and ceased having direct day to day individual contributor responsibilities with VCA and Woofware.

75% reduction in training and onboarding time

37% increase on average in checkin time

40% increase in accuracy of boarding price quoting and manangement

52% increase in medical record accuracy over the previous digital and paper system

Given the project's initial success VCA continued to engage with us on futher collaboration. I hired three more designers to expand on the feature offerings of the desktop app that included an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system and a mobile/tablet companion app for medical technicians and veterinarians.

To respect confidentiality, final Hi-Fi assets and the actual metric values have been omitted.

VCA Animal Hospitals Hospital Management