Responsibilities
User Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews
UX/UI Redesign + Iterations
Deliver final recommendations
New Colors & Styleguide (individual contribution)
Role & Timeline
Role: UX consultant
Team of 6 members
Members: Alexander Kempf, Alexander Pan, Ariel Chen, Sally Kim, Tina Sato, Yusuf Amani
This project took 3 months to complete
project Background
Who is InstaMed?
InstaMed is a J.P. Morgan company that powers a better healthcare payments experience on one platform that connects consumers, providers, and payers for every healthcare payment transaction. Consumers, providers, and payers benefit from InstaMed’s exclusive focus on healthcare, integration into any healthcare IT system, robust analytics, and proven scale.
What is InstaMed Online for Providers?
“InstaMed Online for Providers” is InstaMed’s cloud-based product that allows healthcare providers to manage and track every healthcare clearinghouse and payment transaction and offers robust reporting tools.
Who is the Target Audience?
We have segmented out three groups based on typical users. Each one of these uses InstaMed Online for Provider in a different way.
Standard account users looking to receive, print, and reconcile health insurance claim payments (ERA/EFT).
Premium account users looking for patient engagement solutions like patient billing, patient payments, and a dedicated patient payment portal.
Premium Plus account users looking to leverage InstaMed Online within their existing system via InstaMed Connect API.
the why
InstaMed Online for Providers has not had a large-scale facelift since 2013
As a group of graduate students studying Human-Computer Interaction and Design at UC Irvine, we partnered with Patrick Monahan (UX Manager) and Steve Ngo (Sr. UX Designer) from InstaMed’s product department to help research and propose recommendations for a future redesign of InstaMed Online for Providers.
InstaMed Online for Providers has not had a large-scale facelift since 2013, and with conversations about a potential overhaul of the system not just on the front-end but on the back-end as well, we were presented with the challenge of coming up with recommendations that truly keep usability in mind.
problem
The cumbersome and outdated interface
Through research, we found out that users (Healthcare providers) generally love the solutions InstaMed has offered but don't enjoy the cumbersome and outdated interface.
How might we declutter the interface of InstaMed Online for Providers to streamline the user’s workflow?
Objectives & limitations
Main objectives
Interview and research current design implementation with active users
Research and propose better design practices for future iterations
Research and propose improved information architecture (improve discoverability and navigation)
Design an interactive prototype of proposed solutions
Limitations
Apart from the time and financial limitations given by our program and our client. We were told by InstaMed that the sky’s the limit with only two limitations:
Don’t add new functionality (i.e. Chat functions, FAQs, etc...)
Don’t create new tools
Research & Synthesis
Heuristic Review
A heuristic analysis is a holistic review of a system while referencing an established, credible set of usability principles and guidelines. Our team used Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics to conduct our analysis of InstaMed Online and identified several violations that led to preliminary insights of potential design recommendations.
Results
We can help users accomplish their tasks with minimal guidance and greater efficiency by:
Simplifying the interface
Reduce “feature bloat”
Improving discoverability
Improving navigation
Making help and documentation more visible
Stakeholder Interviews
Internal stakeholder interviews were conducted to understand the ultimate business objectives regarding the InstaMed Online for Providers redesign. Given a list of provided stakeholders, we conducted 30-minute informal conversations with various members and executives of the InstaMed product department.
Main Takeaways
J.P. Morgan's acquisition has shifted business priorities which makes it difficult to pursue significant product design changes.
All stakeholders are aware that InstaMed looks and feels “outdated” and agree that it needs an upgrade.
Technical limitations (having to use existing libraries) make upgrading challenging.
Customer Interviews
Our main research was conducted through user interviews with existing InstaMed customers. We hoped to challenge some of the statements gathered from the stakeholder interviews, where it was suggested that there isn’t enough negative feedback regarding usability to prioritize making changes.
Before each interview, we asked participants to fill out a short questionnaire that helped us understand the demographic, and also helped to inform our interview protocol, as we asked participants to walk us through the various tasks they responded within the questionnaire (i.e. “Which of the following tasks do you accomplish using InstaMed Online?).
General Insight
Users feel lost when they are faced with an unexpected task
InstaMed is never the primary tool/system in users’ workflows (users are always using multiple systems)
Users’ day-to-day jobs are tedious and require constant data validation and/or verification (e.g. triple-check info)
Not all users are dedicated professional billing staff for their practice
Users often feel frustrated but can’t articulate why
User Interface Insights
Customers are satisfied with the solution/service, but not with the interface
Users are unaware of features that can streamline their workflow
Users are satisfied with the email notification experience
Users often need to guess the meaning of input field criteria and other labels
Users have difficulty in differentiating between labels (e.g. similarly worded menus)
Users use current “Reports” menus more as a search function, not to run actual reports
“I very rarely have to save the Excel file and use it for anything else. It’s really just the data manipulation that is challenging in the portal.”
“I have a very hard time getting the information in the way that I want it.”
“The portals that I like best are the ones that I can search old claims and EOBs for easier.”
design
Proposed Redesign
To recap, our main objectives and focus points were to improve discoverability and navigation so that users would be able to accomplish their tasks with minimal guidance and greater efficiency. We discovered that poor information architecture and visibility of elements contributed to users’ difficulty in using InstaMed Online.
Consolidating Menus
The current system requires users to navigate between menus simply to accomplish a single task. This architecture requires users to conform to the system’s flow of accomplishing that task, rather than adapting to the variety of ways users might approach their task. We propose, therefore, a menu structure that focuses on the general task by consolidating all actions related to an overall task into a single page as well as developing a universal search function to reduce the use of forms across several separate pages.
Menu Structure and Nomenclature
In the wake of all the discussions and research, one thing became clear: the current “Healthcare” menu does not work. Most users agreed that the label “Healthcare” is ambiguous, which is particularly detrimental for the infrequent user who has to re-familiarize themselves with the interface each time they log in. User testing revealed that, even among power users (i.e. those who use IMO very frequently), the word “Clearinghouse” made more sense for the features available within it.
We also determined that, given mixed opinions about the grouping of Eligibility with Claims and Remittance, pulling Eligibility out to the top-level navigation would help improve discoverability as well as overall efficiency.
Changing “Configure” to “Settings” also reduces system jargon, and physically separating out the Settings and Logout button help to improve visual hierarchy.
Consolidating Reports
Our expert reviews revealed the redundancy of having a separate reports function for every individual menu, and our customer interviews revealed that most users did not use those report functions to generate or create reports as intended, but rather as a substitute for a non-existent universal search function.
Given that one of InstaMed’s greatest strength is the robustness of its analytics and reporting capabilities, consolidating Reports into a dedicated menu item for all types of reports increases the visibility of the tool to users, hopefully propelling them to take full advantage of InstaMed’s powerful features.
Actionable Dashboard
One of the greatest difficulties infrequent users face is the difficulty of orienting themselves in an unfamiliar system. InstaMed's ability to configure users' default screens benefit the power user, but those who do not frequent IMO would find themselves at a Home screen that is effectively irrelevant to their daily tasks and does not help guide them to where they need to go.
We propose a new home screen in the form of an actionable dashboard that allows for the ability to gain a comprehensive overview of the user's practice, but more importantly, the ability to quickly get started with whatever task the user set out to accomplish through features like "Frequent Tasks". Additionally, the personalized layout makes one of InstaMed’s strengths, a highly configurable system, more visible to the user.
user testing
Using the key insights gained through heuristic evaluation and customer interviews, we came up with a redesign of IMO in the form of an interactive prototype.
The primary goal of user testing was to find out the impressions users have towards our redesign. Given our small sample size, we decided to keep the test mostly qualitative in nature by focusing more on participants’ responses to follow-up questions about the tasks they were prompted to perform using the interactive prototype.
Objectives
Find out the impressions users have of the IMO redesign
Find out how users compare the IMO redesign to the current UI
Find out which changes the users think are improvements and which are not, with a focus on nomenclature and the overall menu structure.
Identify areas for improvement in order to iterate on the IMO redesign
“ I liked your tabs better than just the menu bar at the top; it made it easier to visually know where you were.”
“Fits the bill for what is typical and standard...in this field, we really appreciate consistency.”
“I think it would make my workflow faster and more efficient because I would be able to find things that I’m looking for a lot quicker.”
user testing feedback
Top Critical Feedback
The eligibility “Service Type” section needs to be expanded
“Request Demographic Update” intended function is unclear
Power-user expected to see the “Payment Plans” tab in Payments
“Payment Plans” is not visible enough and takes too many clicks to accomplish a task
The term “Outlet” is unclear
“New Claim” button suggests it’s a place to submit one singular manual claim
Top Positive Feedback
Easy to navigate
Menu structure is clear
Search process is simplified
“Frequent Tasks” section is useful
The term “Clearinghouse” is understandable
Consolidation of payer payments + patient payments
The changes improve efficiency
Clean aesthetic
Layout of patient profile page
deliverables
Conclusion
By completing the HCI process with research and design methods, our team addressed IMO’s pain points of a poor navigation experience and weak information architecture by reducing the clutter of unnecessary design elements and streamlining user workflows.
By implementing these recommendations, InstaMed can improve IMO’s usability issues and help current and future users. In summary, we suggest creating a new navigation experience by consolidating actions and having a comprehensive search, changing the vocabulary to match the mental model of the users, and improving the table views with more customization to fit the users’ specific needs. We strongly believe that once these recommendations are applied, IMO will be optimized for users’ workflows and will also increase the discoverability of the many strengths and features IMO already offers. However, we also suggest continuing usability testing on these findings, to potentially uncover more insights about IMO’s users that can inform further changes.
Our team feels honored to have been included in helping to improve InstaMed Online for Providers and we are excited to see how it will be redesigned in the future.
Thank you for reading! 🧠
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