Reimagining a First Time User Experience

Enabling Participants and Study Staff who work for the All of Us Research Program to accelerate medical research and drive precision medicine

Our Team

The UX Strategy team:

We partnered on scoping and prioritization throughout the project.

• Myself: Design and Research (interviewing and testing)

• Product Manager: Leadership coordination and planning

• Program Manager: Program SME, research, and documentation

Other contributors:

• Engineering lead for consultation

• Enterprise users for interviews and testing

• Patients and Participant Users for interviewing

Timeline:

• We estimated 3-4 months and completed in 3 months from our initial conversation through MVP hand off, VQA, and provided mid-fidelity designs for phase 1

Our Why

This initiative started out ambiguous, with a request for a new app that addresses onboarding friction so more participants could register without staff support.

Business Goals: Customer retention and satisfaction, participant conversion, maintain reputation of creating reliable, scalable, secure, compliant, intuitive, and accessible products.

Customer Challenges: The All of Us Research Program was navigating high training cost from research staff burn out and staff missing their recruitment targets. Interested participants are not completing core study protocol. The program evaluates participants’ health and habits using a core set of protocol that includes bio-samples, fitness trackers, geographical data, and surveys.

Enterprise User Challenges: Health Research Staff are effectively sales staff who must reduce the time spent educating participants and fixing technical issues during participant onboarding to meet their recruitment targets. Staff want to “leave the iPad in the patient’s room and confidently move to the next person.”

Consumer User Challenges: Participants are primarily patients in hospitals and medical facilities across the U.S. They have a range of distractions and disabilities so intuitive, accessible experiences are a must. Onboarding is too long and confusing without guidance. They are easily discouraged by technical interruptions.

• Async audit of our users current journey, labelling challenges based on user research, usage data, and usability best practices; then we came together to evaluate and prioritize our suggested changes

• Creating a service map of all actors: customer/AoURP, enterprise/study staff users, consumer/participant users, and backstage actors: regulations, compliance, security, and product lines to optimize automation and geo-mapping opportunities

• I shadowed our users to understand the recruitment process. This included walking the hospital halls alongside study staff and meeting patients

  • This takes too long… I’m in too much pain… My kids are too distracting… It crashed again! Why is it asking me ‘if I’m sure’ again? Where is my information going? Can I just read it instead of watching these videos? - Quotes I heard while observing participants

• Competitor research: I collated onboarding solutions from other research and health onboarding app experiences

• Best practices and accessibility: I evaluated general onboarding frameworks including survey accessibility practices

• Constraints: My partners collected customer study protocols, state consent requirements, and technical constraints

• Branding: I reviewed our customer’s style guide and subsequent marketing and product materials to create a new aesthetic

Our Definition of Success:

Merge business, customer, and user opportunities into a redesign of the first time user experience that is simple, accessible, and intuitive to inform The Participant Experience Team’s product roadmap. We must:

• Balance research staff burden by qualifying and capturing participant information early for easier follow up later by onsite or remote study staff

• Balance participant burden by employing usability best practices, heuristics, and gamification, segmenting the Registration, Profile, Account, eConsent, and core protocol to decrease initial time investment and reward user engagement

• Counteract technical challenges with saving and embedding content into a focused flow to guide participants and limiting the consequences of wifi or iPad interruptions

• Ensure compliance with consent, state and policy regulations, HIPAA, and security protocols

Ideating, prototyping, and testing iteratively

• As part of discovery, I reorganized the content into a revised workflow, and drawing sketches on a whiteboard to brainstorm with my team

• Created a mid-fidelity design and wrote copy, creating a component library, continuously iterating based on team and technical team input

• Built and tested a mid-fidelity prototype with our enterprise users while at an onsite in Arizona, at one of their hospitals and at a conference event, collecting feedback. Summarized notes and recordings and shared learnings to affirm and prioritize changes

• Iterated the designs and copy to infuse learnings

Executing the vision

• Handoff: As part of the UX Strategy team, we shared our research, mid-fidelity designs, and strategic vision with Participant Experience Team

• Follow through: Along with that team, we devised an implementation plan that was in line with their existing efforts and updated their product roadmap. We met with the Participant Experience Team on an ongoing basis as needed

Designing:

The First Time User Experience (FTUX)

• qualifying question(s)

• registration

• profile with geo-pairing

• eConsent

• Shorter, accessible surveys

Addressing registration concerns while enabling enterprise user follow up

• We qualified participants by asking for their birth date before allowing registration
  – Reduced “dead” accounts (partial or ineligible users), protected adoption rates, prevented tech complications

• We combined username field and grouped password restrictions
  – Reduced user actions and cognitive load (hick’s law: more choices; longer decision time)

• We grouped and rewarded activities throughout registration to collect follow up information first
  – Improved conversion rates, reduced onboard time and frustration, increased reliability by reducing app crashing due to hospital wifi or users turning the screen

• We user geo-mapping to automatically paired them with a nearby facility with an option to change it then or at any time in the future
  – Reduced user actions and effort, Increased pairing accuracy, and reduced staff burden to assign or merge user accounts

Designing:

Home and core program protocol

Increasing usability and accessibility to promote participation

• Added time estimates and descriptions to all content and offered engagement choices
  – Enabled users to have more control and understanding while increasing accessibility and understanding

• Revised the content delivery format, replacing popups that caused tech issues on iPads and added hierarchy, eliminated distractions like excess navigation to emphasize primary tasks
  - Reduced technical issues, optimized frame size to increase engagement

• We added an activity archive encouraging participation
  –Enabled users to see, and stay up-to-date on, their study activities

• We explained the value and benefits of sharing information while promoting altruistic and scientific benefits of the program to encourage engagement
  -Increased engagement and connection to the program through trust, reputation, and study awareness

Designing:

A new look and feel

We redefined our customer’s style guide

• We pulled out the orange to bright up the experience

• We utilized the blues to guide the experience from headers to actions

• This component library made changes seamless

Outcomes

• Redesign: A more accessible, scalable, and intuitive onboarding experience to increase independent participant conversion by enabling staff to follow up with stalled participants, circumvented technical constraints

• Internal Collaboration: We built an alliance between our UX Strategy Team and The Participant Experience Team that allowed us to iteratively implement changes

• Enterprise User Collaboration: We built trusted partnerships with our enterprise users during our onsite fostering increased understanding and empathy of our users, and opened the door for more user feedback to help us prioritize future initiatives

• Reputation: We increased customer and user loyalty and trust by proving we are innovative, strategic, and caring partners

Reflection

• Handoff: We could have delineated enhancements more clearly, and shared earlier on

• User Empathy: We could have invited a participant team designer to the onsite to shadow research staff/enterprise users and meet participants/end users to increase their empathy for our participant users because my notes couldn’t have truly articulated how powerful the experience wa

• Documentation/Metrics: I could have documented metrics after the participant team launched our changes to tell this story quantitatively. I could have also measured conversion rates based on independent completion vs enterprise follow up rather than only focusing on task completion generally