Case 01
Redesigned Nursing Workflows by Tailoring to Distinct User Groups
ChristianaCare
Redesigned Nursing Workflows by Tailoring to Distinct User Groups
ChristianaCare Nursing Quality Assessment Website Redesign
Overview
Improved an assessment platform workflow and information architecture by aligning to 3 user mental models, achieving 88% task success.
My Role
UX Design Intern
Company
ChristianaCare
Timeline
June 2024- August 2024
Team
1 UX Designer
2 UX Analysts
1 UI Designer
3 Front-end Engineers
1 Clinician
Skills
Figma
Domain Expertise
Agile Methodologies
Usability Testing
Problem
How might we redesign the Nursing Quality Monitor, an assessment tool used by ChristianaCare hospitals, to support three distinct user groups while accelerating the 48-hour reporting process?
Solution
Data Collection Nurse Flow: Assessment-focused
Nurses begin by viewing how many patients on their unit have been assessed, giving them a quick sense of workload. They can start a pending assessment or look up a patient name, and fill out pressure injury information in a dynamic, sectioned form that corresponds with EHR.
Wound Nurse Flow: Validation-focused
Wound nurses can view the number of wounds pending validation to quickly understand their workload. By starting validation, they can review all reported wounds, access completed forms, and efficiently validate or delete entries by comparing them with EHR information.
Data Analyst Flow: Report, Administration-focused
Data analysts can view the total number of patients assessed to get a clear overview of PI day progress. From the dashboard, they can focus on their key tasks: reports that are submitted and edit/export them, or administration, like scheduling PI days and sending reminders to nurses.
Now, let's start with some context
ChristianaCare is a national healthcare organization, and its Health and Innovation team is responsible for developing innovative enterprise and commercial products facing both clinicians/non-clinicians and patients. As a UX Design Intern with a focus on human-centered design and Gen AI, I worked on two projects that optimize the experiences of healthcare professionals: NQM, and CritiTrac (see project).
The Nursing Quality Monitor (NQM) is the primary assessment tool used across all ChristianaCare hospitals to evaluate patient pressure injuries during monthly Process Improvement (PI) days. As part of the software upgrade, I served different roles throughout the sprints.
Goal
Modernize the outdated NQM design to improve usability, support all users' jobs while aligning with NDNQI requirements.
My Role
Product Owner & Development Team Member during initial 4 weeks, helping set the foundation for the strategic software update.
Product Development Process
The team engaged in a sprint-style development process. During pre-sprint and sprint 1 I was a Dev Team member responsible for assessment database-relevant research. In sprint 2 and 3, as the Product Owner, where I was responsible for researching and iterating quickly to come to a concept-based design decision for the product.
Understanding the Problem
First of all, I learned about a problem surrounding the 3 key users: Data Analysts, Data Collection Nurse, Wound Nurse.
When you expect a clear, one-way workflow, the reality is that there are a lot of factors involved that creates many mini sub-flows that drags the process longer:
In-field observation and surveying reveals another problem. We asked nurses and data analysts to describe their work and ask questions like:
"What action do you perform?"
"How do you call this tool?"
"Who calls it the same way?"
I summarized each role with a statement:
The users use different terminologies due to differences in duty, unit, and tools at hand.
What do these tell us?
These insights pointed to a core issue: while the three users are part of the same assessment workflow, they operate with different mental models, terminologies, and priorities. This fragmentation not only affects communication but also slows down decision-making.
To address this, we translated our research into design themes that respect each user’s role-specific workflow. The original design is a one-size-fits-all assessment tool, so I thought:
I began wireframing surround this idea by tailoring the homepage, metrics, and core actions for each user group with:
Key Metric: Differentiate homepage interface by displaying key target metric that nurses and data analysts look for. Previously, they look for this information by referring to a combination of notes, EHR, and unit situation.
Key Function: Highlight nurses and data analysts's key jobs to be done in action buttons and side menu tabs. Previously, they explore functions that are looking for amongst a list of all functions.
Data Collection Nurse
📊 Key metric: number of patients assessed
💼 Key function: Assessment form
Wound Nurse
📊 Key metric: number of wounds validated
💼 Key function: validating wounds sent from data collection nurses
Data Analyst
📊 Key metric: number of total patients assessed
💼 Key function: synthesizing all data and reporting externally
Usability Tests
We conducted usability tests accordingly with data collection nurses, wound nurses, and data analysts by assigning them tasks while navigating through the Figma wireframes.
After iteration, the updated wireframes receive a relatively high task completion rate with the following feedback:
💬 Data Collection Nurse: "The updated version of the assessment is life-changing. I can imagine myself being so productive in doing it, and training others."
💬 Wound Nurse: "I like how the design pays respect to us...it gives us a sense of control and say in the flow of work, like when I delegate between other nurses and the system admin."
💬 Data Analyst: "I like the clear lines between different data lookup and export formats. Looks like it will help me reduce some workload."
Results
Challenges
Collaborating with Development Team Real-Time
I worked very closely with the software developers in building the basic assessment database, which required fast-paced iteration on wireframes that is goal-driven instead of perfection-driven, which I grew to adapt to as a Product Owner.
Balancing Between What User WANTS vs. NEEDS
Hearing what users would like to see and use made me overwhelmed at times — users want EVERYTHING on the page. Learning to take inspiration from the big picture, such as users mental model, their patterns of behaviors, and taking only bits of the wants helps me make designs that drive the needs of the experience.
Making Someone Key
Having three key stakeholder each holding their own professional opinion is difficult — and it all comes down to making the Wound Nurse perspective key since they are the middleman and expert of the assessment, and designing surrounding the idea.
Catherine Burch
Vice President
Your constant drive to seek feedback and improve is so helpful and inspiring, and it really resulted in great things. What you have contributed here is amazing.
Kelsey Kosinski
Senior UX Analyst
Philip Chan
Associate UX Analyst
