RubiconMD, a healthcare startup, is a platform for Healthcare Professionals to submit questions (eConsults) regarding their patients to leading specialists. Since I was the first seasoned designer, my time was spent trying to pay down design debt while establishing foundational systems that could evolve as the company grew.
Since 2013, this platform had gone through many iterations and two separate rebranding efforts, resulting in inconsistencies, design debt, and many unintuitive one-off elements. Once joining the team, my priority became a standardization of overall design and branding, affording the platform much-needed scalability. To that end, I started in on a formal Design System.
I established guidelines for the new brand, considering many elements like logo use, color, type, icons, illustrations, and photography. Each part of the business was marching to its own beat when building decks and work materials, so a broad standardization was crucial and long-overdue. My Style Guide became the connective tissue between the core platform and all the representative materials which surrounded it.
I realized we needed a foundation to standardize the legacy platform’s unintuitive one-off components. These were not only causing design debt, but technical debt within the Front-End team. After setting the stage with a grid-based architecture, we standardized buttons, input fields, and other components, allowing our processes to become more Agile. This cultivated better communication and collaboration between us all as the Design System grew. As a cherry on top, these elements were built to be modular and scalable, all while working towards WCAG 2.0 AA standards, allowing for inclusivity every user.
With a Design System in place, we were able to put it through the paces with a new feature — a new dashboard for our users. This feature was prioritized above all others for two critical reasons:
Since our platform connected to different Electronic Health Records systems, we had many different entry points into the platform, but no single page that could be called “Home.”
After extensive interviews with our healthcare industry users, it became apparent that they wanted a way to review their account activity, and that they valued a central repository for their content to be served.
Working with a Product Manager and our User Engagement Team, I used whiteboarding sessions to workshop a few options, and quickly moved into designing the screens using my broader Design System.
Ultimately, this new dashboard increase eConsult submissions by 15%. When COVID-19 hit, these content updates led to a 400% increase in clicks and overall engagement, compared to an otherwise normal day. These metrics would also highlight the need for a proper CMS on the roadmap, since all of these engagement-driving content updates were being done manually. The Design System itself also paid off as I’d hoped; it improved the experience, paid down design debt, educated the company on design’s impact to our brand, and cultivated a better relationship between design and engineering. A win-win-win-win!
As our user base grew, the internal PHI (Protected Health Information) redaction tool was no longer cutting it. Only one redactor was allowed in the tool at a time, and the queue was coordinated via Slack in a bloated, manual process. To make matters worse, there was no preview mechanism for images, nor a basic auditing system for quality control. Lastly, our dev team had no Front-End bandwidth, so my designs needed to fit within the Back-End team’s favored Bootstrap 3 framework.
Following internal user interviews, we realized that documents in their queue were arranged individually, but related eConsult documents were actually submitted as a whole. We rethought their queue, organizing it so each redactor would take ownership of an entire eConsult entity, rather than individual docs. Since the redactor was now working at the eConsult level, we gained back enough visual real-estate to allow for an in-page preview. We were also able to leverage these concepts in a streamlined auditing queue for team leader review.
Once the user flows were solidified, I built a prototype to gather further feedback from the Operations Team, covering the new features and alt states. And with only a few tweaks, the Back-End team were able to run with my Bootstrap-friendly designs; in the end, our live version was nearly identical to my prototype.
Launched in May of 2020, “Redactinator 2.0” has been crucial to the platform’s growth. Through June and July 2020, the team handled 4,000 attachments with an accuracy at 97%. Over July 2020, this represented an overall volume increase of 19%. Beyond that, parallel tests of the old and new redactors resulted in a 51% reduction in overall Activation Time. All of this translates to a critical support process being flexible and scalable enough to accommodate future success of the business.
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I've had the privilege to work with a diverse range of clients and teams, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
