RC Task Manager
Launching a Task Manager
Empowering Health Research Study Staff in hospitals and universities to recruit and retain Participants – guiding them through explicit research protocol which included donating bio-samples and survey data
Our Team
Core team:
I led discovery and design
Product manager coordinated team efforts
Lead engineer
Additional contributors
Product leadership shared a recording of their customer advisory board meeting
Customer success specialist was our core user advocate
User testing specialist
Engineering team
Timeline:
Roughly 7 weeks from initial conversation to handoff; including user research and testing
Our Why
Discovery allowed us to align business goals and user challenges. This initiative was ambiguous and time sensitive.
Business Goals: Become the single source of customer task tracking while enhancing our reputation of making useful, reliable, and user-friendly products.
Customer Challenges: Increase security and efficiency of the program by decreasing the number of tools used by their health research teams across the country while increasing their ability to track progress more holistically.
Enterprise User Challenge: Research Staff need a centralized place to track and manage their daily activities. Staff Managers need visibility into their team’s bandwidth and accomplishments to report their progress to our customer.
Product Context: Research Cloud is an enterprise product with 25+ modules that is used by 1,500+ researchers from 17+ health studies across 62+ locations, servicing 600,000+ participants. Enterprise users work in hospital systems and universities, using this tool to recruit and retain participant users, guiding them through explicit research protocol which includes donating bio-samples and survey data.
Research and Discovery
Understanding and empathizing with our users
Reviewed high-level intended business outcome, scoped requirements, technical limitations, and timeline
Collected user insights from our senior HPO managers to better understand our user’s challenges and goals; including but not limited to, watching advisory board meeting recordings, and initial feedback from a wireframe started by a Product Manager
Mapped their primary task workflows to best understand the fulls scope of services and see what information our users need to know when and why – this helped us prioritize the most impactful workflows.
Analyzed competitor offerings by creating accounts with other project management tools to evaluate their workflows, identified industry standards that we could leverage
Definition of success:
Increase enterprise user adoption, engagement, and satisfaction:
Save our users time by creating a centralized, streamlined tool to track and report on their most impactful daily research activities
Task types within scope: administrative tasks, scheduled appointments or follow up calls, 1:1 engagements, case lists, segmentations, and campaigns
Give our users visibility into their individual and team bandwidth to ensure active participant engagement and program efficacy
Designing, Testing, and Building
Ideating, Prototyping, and Testing
We started with mid-fidelity, utilizing the product’s design system.
Iterated based on internal team, stakeholder guidance, and technical limitations
Partnered with Customer Success Specialist to document user testing goals and created google form surveys that our enterprise users completed
Performed 2 focus group style testing sessions with our users, collating feedback to create an actionable list of changes to focus our scope for MVP
Iterated based on test insights and peer reviews with internal resources
Executing
Shared screens using Zeplin with offshore team and met regularly
Began designs for Phase 1 to inform and set a vision for future enhancements
Testing the Homepage:
User Testing Round 1
The core differentiator is the way the appointments are displayed since that was the primary use for this task manager. These designs purposefully showed all task types RC/PMT offers to indirectly force our users to tell us what is most important for MVP.
Option A (calendar): Offers our users a mini-calendar similar to the calendar they see in scheduling. Offers the ability to drag and drop tasks onto the calendar and see when peers are out of the office. Offers interactivity with the table to update progress, assignees, and due dates. The table offers an accordion to see a deeper dive into their call lists preventing them from opening the module directly.
Option B (kanban): Offers a kanban board approach, but with some interactivity; however, our users would need to navigate to the module to complete tasks. Appointments would always be positioned on the right and uniquely categorized to help with prioritization of those appointment tasks.
Option C (table kanban): Combines aspects of A and B where we showcase their appointments in a table format so they can quickly see lots of details while maintaining kanban framework for other tasks.
Testing Workflows
User Testing Round 2
We learned the researchers prefer the tables and managers were mixed, because some managers are both players and coaches. They preferred tables because they needed quick access to a lot of information and didn’t want to jump around to find it. We quickly iterated for this final round of testing to gauge if all of our assumptions of their feedback was accurate.
*There were 10 screens tested, to evaluate each task drawer.
Leveraging the beloved table format, this design allows for editing in drawers so our users can see everything from here without going to each module. We kept features that were well reviewed, like, special notes for appointments. We also reduced the task types to custom tasks, appointments and follow ups, and case lists. We tested new terminology too.
Edit custom task drawer: instead of a popup, this provides more space for more information which was a common theme throughout testing.
View case list drawer: evaluating these drawers helped us understand how they interacted with the information to rearrange content to suite their needs.
Participant appointment drawer: leveraging and reformatting the existing scheduling workflow was an opportunity to also improve that feature.
Sharing Designs with Engineering
Delivering MVP
Rave reviews on round 2 with mostly minor changes based on technical limitations that we knew may be a challenge but this allowed us to plan for future phases without the need for another round of testing. MVP actions go directly to the modules except for Creating Custom Tasks.
This was a strong win for the team and our users!
Key changes were that we were only able to provide appointments, engagement follow ups, case lists, and completed tasks. We also had to adapt our filter functionality.
Task manager with in-line success alerts
Task manager if our users do not have any tasks available
Filters dropdown menus
Future Phase
I got so excited about this feature and designed for our potential next phase based on all of the user testing and feedback from internal peer reviews
Magenta text denotes product manager and engineering feedback requests because I’m introducing additional task types and features
Combines time and details columns in the Scheduled tasks table with a tabbed experience for different types of scheduled tasks because our users voiced concerns that it was too cluttered instead of seeing the full day of activities at once. This version includes the drawers that were a favorite by all of our users and we added custom tasks back for their administrative needs. This also allows for appointment confirmations, another widely appreciated feature.
Showing engagement follow up tasks tab.
Shows appointment tasks that require outcomes. Outcomes are required to officially complete an appointment so that our system knows what transpired during the appointment.
Drawers for adding and editing custom tasks.
Drawers for adding and editing participant appointment tasks.
Drawers for adding and editing case list tasks. Case lists are 1:1 engagement lists where researchers contacts participants for retention activities.
Drawers for engagement follow up tasks that allow our users to input their engagement activities here.
Outcomes
We successfully provided our users with a centralized place to track and manage their daily activities, giving them visibility into their team’s bandwidth and progress which increased user adoption and engagement significantly because our customer agreed to migrate ALL of their recruitment sites across the U.S. to our tool after seeing it, validating that they saw us as a responsive, innovative, inclusive team who could deliver useful, reliable, and user-friendly products quickly
I was able to integrate other key findings from user testing feedback to create the next phase of work as a vision for the future; but we could also evaluate things like deeper integration with our calendar tool
We bridged relationships with Customer Success to improve our understanding of our users journey to increase user empathy and awareness within the team
Reflection
Getting involved with our customers to understand business goals beyond our user’s goals and align towards strategic business outcomes was exciting and fostered customer empathy team wide
I learned a lot about driving product change because I led most of the requirement decisions based on customer and user insights that also informed the future feature vision
Regular meetings with engineering allowed us to get ahead of constraints within the design process so we were able to finalize designs while development was happening