The Modernizing Medicine User Experience (UX) team was on the ground at this year’s MOMENTUM users conference sharing, interacting and collaborating with our clients. The team was thrilled for the opportunity to engage with our customers and make them a part of designing an amazing user experience for our products.
Sharing our Customer-Centered Design Process
On Saturday, November 4, the team started the morning by presenting Customer-Centered Design Practices: Creating amazing experiences for our users. This presentation by Busra Demirci, our Senior UX Designer leading the user experience for our award-winner Kiosk, and me showcased our user-centered design practices at Modernizing Medicine.
Busra and I started by distinguishing the difference between design and UX. We shared the story of a walk in a park with a paved, yet underutilized path, and an unpaved path frequented by visitors. While the paved path is well built, it doesn’t match the path that visitors want to take through the park. We made the point that visitors following the unpaved path have told us the path that they want to follow.
User experience focuses on working closely with our customers to create one unified “happy path.” The team shared with attendees the process that they follow to create a “happy path” and recent examples of how they have applied user-centered design to our products to help enhance EHR usability.
Interacting with Customers at the User Experience Booth
At this year’s users conference, the UX team had a dedicated presence at their own booth, which gave attendees the ability to interact directly with UX team members and provide feedback on some of our recent design work. They were also given the unique opportunity to try out our state-of-the-art eye tracking system that we use to evaluate the visual design of our products.
Customers had the opportunity to sign up for our new Customer Research Panel to participate in future research studies to enhance our products.
Evaluating the User Experience of EMA™
At Modernizing Medicine, usability is a critical factor for user experience and the success of our products. As part of our certification process, we conducted a large-scale usability test of our web and mobile versions of EMA at MOMENTUM with clients. Participants in this research performed typical tasks that they would perform while using EMA. We collected data on task performance and user satisfaction during the test.
The data from this usability test will help us to benchmark the usability performance of our applications and to make sure that our products continually improve with each iteration.
Collaborating with Customers at DesignLab
This year at MOMENTUM we ran DesignLab, a highly collaborative session where customers could help directly influence the design of Modernizing Medicine’s products. Sessions were filled with sticky notes sharing great ideas, hand-drawn sketches of innovative design solutions and spirited discussions on how to make our products even better.
The team facilitated 10 DesignLab sessions, covering a range of topics from enhancing the Photo Management tools to designing the next generation of our Virtual Exam Room in EMA. Each session had a mix of Modernizing Medicine team members including product managers, business analysts, developers and UX designers. A dedicated group of our customers who were excited to be a part of shaping the future of our products made these sessions a resounding success!
Even More Customer-Centered Design at Next Year’s Momentum
Modernizing Medicine values the opportunity to make our customers collaborators as we continue to design and enhance our products. Next year’s MOMENTUM will build upon our DesignLab concept and provide new ways for our clients to provide feedback on our products.
As the industry continues to focus on EHR usability and often times the lack thereof, focusing on and involving clients directly in the process from the very beginning will become increasingly important to enhance the user experience. This foundational belief reigns true at Modernizing Medicine.