Project Goals
- Ensure consistent branding across RISE to make it feel more cohesive with the Genome Medical experience, specifically when it comes to the color palette, logos, and components
- Address UX debt within the RISE flow, ensuring that components and interaction patterns are in keeping with contemporary UX best practices and robust heuristics
- Account for different browser breakpoints and ensure RISE is optimized for both desktop and mobile
- Elevate the visual experience of RISE, creating a clean and welcoming experience for the end user
Design Outcomes V.1
New Branding
RISE contained GeneMatters branding colors and logo, providing a fractured experience for patients and partners. The first part of making the experience more cohesive was ensuring these elements matched. Additionally, while RISE contained some stock imagery, the overall experience was rather flat visually. Since we wanted to increase a sense of welcoming and care, we decided to add more visual elements, such as updated imagery and illustrations.
New Page Styling & Architecture
The RISE flows contained many UX elements that presented issues, notably failing WCAG accessibility standards and lagging behind contemporary UI patterns. The page architecture and layout were also quite compressed and off-balance, creating difficulties in parsing information.
User Testing
Once we made the design updates, our engineering team rebuilt the entire experience in a demo environment, making all of the updates come together. Since we had made so many changes, it was important to gather some feedback from users. Since we wanted to release as quickly as possible and we lacked a large testing budget, I decided to execute some rapid user testing to gather data. This round of testing also represented the first large-scale user testing initiative for RISE.
Goals
- Understand friction / pain points in the current RISE re-designed flow so that we can further enhance the user experience to drive conversion
- Obtain feedback on the visual design / art choices so that we can determine if the new look enhances the end-user’s experience
Methodology
- User Demographics : We recruited eight members of the GMIP org outside of the Prod-Eng team. Users were recruited from various teams across GMI/GMS, such as business development, client success, marketing, and clinical.
- Testing Format : We conducted 30-minute Zoom interviews with each user in which they walked through the entire RISE flow on their mobile devices, narrated their experience, and responded to a series of questions.
- Time Frame: Approximately 4 weeks for recruitment, interviews, and synthesis
Findings Synthesis & Next Steps
After the interviews, we analyzed the findings for patterns to determine our next steps. One aspect of this analysis was creating an affinity map to more easily identify these patterns. We also played around with ChatGPT to extract some patterns.
Key Findings: What’s Working
- An easy experience overall: users described moving through the flows as “clean, smooth, and straightforward”
- Visually effective: users found the visual design “friendly and clean”
- Some especially effective and impactful pages: main landing page, page detailing relatives’ cancer details, scheduling page
Key Findings: What to Change
- Next button functionality: the auto-advance feature was confusing to users, especially since it was used inconsistently
- Pages detailing family size: since the two pages were so similar, users were confused when they advanced to the second page. They also noted they might not have access to all of this information.
- Illustrations: some users enjoyed the illustrations, but they noted a disconnect between the illustration and photos. Another consideration is how the colored illustrations might be discordant with white-labeled versions of the flows.
- Genetic Counseling appointment length: users realized they didn’t know the length of the appointment while scheduling.
- Results page UI: users were confused by the iconography used on the assessment results card.
- Progress bar: Users enjoyed the progress bar, but some found it confusing because it wasn’t accurately tracking progress.
Design Outcomes: V.2
After looking at the key findings, I collaborated with my engineering lead to determine the greatest impact we could make with minimal build. Considering we wanted to release as soon as possible, we picked a few key areas above that could impact the user experience on this first release.
Prototype
Takeaways
- Even without a large budget for research and testing, we were able to gather specific, actionable feedback over a short period of time using the resources we did have
- Members of the GMI team outside of the Prod-Eng org were happy to gain exposure to the redesign while it was in process, increasing their familiarity with and connection to the product
- There are opportunities to share both the process and results of this type of research with the larger organization, potentially through lunch & learn, case study presentation, etc.
