Continual User Participation in Human-Centered Research and Design 

Continual User Participation in Human-Centered Research and Design 

Meaghan Hudak | Reading time: 4 minutes

Many of those who receive health coverage from CMS are some of the most socioeconomically vulnerable populations in the United States. Their right to high quality healthcare is heavily reliant on the ability of CMS and associated healthcare workers to provide effective support for its program beneficiaries and health providers. Ventera provides innovative solutions to continuously improve this support system by centering user feedback in its product development and improvement processes.

We learned about two custom designed and developed CMS products: HCQIS Access Roles and Profile (HARP) and Program Resource System (PRS 2.0). This case study highlights the importance of incorporating human-centered research and design throughout the entire lifecycle of product development. 

Attendees learned: 

• Continual user research with stakeholder/end-user participation in the product development lifecycle leads to relevant and timely user experience (UX) design and increased user investment towards product success,
• Flexibly shifting between having a leadership mindset and a team player mindset in a cross-functional team is key, and
• From creating a minimum viable product to adding value to an MVP, the focus of UX research often changes, but the human-centered approach does not end when each project milestone is reached.

The presentation was facilitated by Shelagh Cully, Senior User Experience Designer, Mana Hayashi, Senior User Experience Researcher, and Hyorim Park, Senior User Experience Researcher. All speakers are with Ventera. 

Shelagh starts the presentation off with an audience question, “What does it mean to be continually engaged?” For users that might mean collecting follow-up information and feedback. In order to do so, the whole product team has to be continually engaged with each other.

Human-Centered Research and Design: Best Practices

1. Collaborate cross-functionally
2. Continually engage users
3. Work iteratively think holistically

Shelagh asks, How do we incorporate these best practices into the product team workflow? How do we continue to bring value to users? Below includes information of the ESS team: 

Enterprise Systems and Services (ESS) 

Cross-Functional Work Process

Through the second stage, Man explains how to engage users through cross-functional collaboration. The lead user experience researcher conducts the user interviews and faciliate a 1-on-1 conversation with the interviewer. The audience is shown an example with PRS 2.0 interviews. PRS 2.0 users search for information on Medicare/Medicaid doctors. One pain point observed was that users could not find a doctor's group practice affiliations easily. We learn the benefits of cross-functional engagement of users. These include: users can speak directly to product team on their needs/concerns, product team members can more easily empathize with users and team consensus on product needs are grounded in user perspectives. 

Hyorim explains why it is important to engage users by collaborating beyond your team. The ESS Team worked with the Help Desk Team and explored why HARP users contact the
Help Desk. These reasons are: not being able to login, forgotten password and manual identity proofing. The outcome below shows steps the teams made to implement HARP changes: 

Hyorim provided the benefits of collaborating beyond product teams. These benefits include: the product team can discover user pain points in real-time and reduced workload for all involved. 

Continually Engaging Users 

Shelagh shares the importance of managing user lists to track user participation and building relationships with participants in the early product stages. As the products mature, the user lists grow significantly. Within PRS 2.0, the team identified core user needs. Most of the users were patient facing. One of the pain points a user discussed, was that the name of the facility was constantly changing and how it was difficult to find information. With this new functionality, users can now search the facility address which helped fulfill the users needs. Keeping the human-centered work process top of mind, teams should continue to: have product team work regularly with the UX team to communicate with users, consistently manage user lists to recruit and build trust with users and work in iterations, but keep in mind user’s entire journey with the product.

Shelagh, Mana and Hyorim left the audience with some pro-tips to continually engage users:

Involve product team and stakeholders
in UX research and design

Keep open communication channels
with other teams that support users

Create encouraging atmosphere
for users to experiment and give feedback

Demonstrate impact
of continual user participation to users and stakeholders

Observe product usage
to discover problem areas

Validate solutions
with users before implementation

Make time
to ask users open-ended questions on full product experience

Create dedicated findings repository
as seed ideas for future research

Embed survey and recruitment in product
for ongoing user feedback

If you missed the case study presentation, check out the transcript and recording on the CCSQ World Usability Day page. This page also includes an archive of transcripts and recordings of speaker presentations, session materials, and event photos. For more information about the Human-Centered Design Center of Excellence, refer to the HCD CoE Confluence page.