Overview

Client: Large national organization (50,000+ employees) (“HealthTech”)

Project: Lead UX Researcher & Strategist

Objective: To improve the employee experience by redesigning the internal finance dashboard used daily by HealthTech’s national workforce, aiming to increase productivity, reduce frustration, and foster a more engaging work environment.

Background

HealthTech, a leading player in the healthcare industry, recognized that their internal tools and systems were outdated, leading to inefficiencies, employee frustration, and a decline in overall job satisfaction. The company sought to leverage UX principles not only to update their financial insights dashboard but to transform the employee experience, making daily tasks more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable.

Challenge

• Diverse User Needs: HealthTech’s national workforce had a wide range of roles and responsibilities, requiring a nuanced approach to address diverse user needs (e.g., account executives, accountants).

• System Fragmentation: The existing ecosystem of internal tools was fragmented and lacked integration, complicating workflows and communication (each vertical within the organization had previously been allowed to set up and operate their own systems… leading to chaos).

• Change Management: Implementing a new system across a large, 50,000+ employee organization presented significant change management challenges, requiring careful planning and communication (e.g., each vertical had their own culture and they were extremely skeptical of a “top-down” solution from upper management).

Approach

• Stakeholder Workshops: Conducted initial management-level workshops with representatives from various verticals to align on objectives, gather requirements, and understand the scope of impact. I planned these workshops to requirement interaction and conversation between the verticals, which allowed me to see first-hand the cultural dynamics at play (looking for what is not said is key: How do the verticals work together? Who interupts/rolls their eyes at who? Who is most skeptical about this project? Who is the most excited?). I was also quickly able to identify potential “change campions” at the management-level.

• Employee Surveys and Interviews: Utilized surveys and conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-section of employees to identify pain points, needs, and suggestions for improvement. I chose one-on-one interviews because I knew that there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the current finance tools and I wanted to give employees the privacy they needed to share their honest, unpolished thoughts (this was a no-office-politics space!). I paired that qualitative data with quantitive data from vertical-wide surveys, which helped me back up the sentiments that I heard in the interviews.

• Ethnographic Research: Walking a mile in the users’ shoes was essential to me conceptualizing the big picture of how/where this internal finance tool fit into their day to day. I spent several days shadowing folks within various verticals, and at various levels. I took pictures of their work stations and even sat in on a small birthday lunch (I later referenced the “real life” examples I was able to gain when communicating exactly WHY a change was important to the end user).

• Usability Testing: Conducted usability testing via walk throughs of the tool, allowing me to learn first about what users thought (e.g., “See! Right here is where I would have thought I could access the raw finance data. But look - there’s only the polished insights.”).

• Persona Development and Journey Mapping: Created employee personas and mapped out typical user journeys to identify critical touchpoints and opportunities for enhancing the user experience.

• Action Segmentation: Quantified the behaviors I saw using organizational data on # of employees in various roles and across verticals. I used this to inform the prioritization of my ultimate recommendations, and it also helped my client receive added funding from top HealthTech leadership (it’s always easier to get funding when the client can show a great number of users will be positively impacted by changes).

• Prototyping and User Testing: Developed prototypes of the redesigned tools and conducted iterative user testing sessions, refining the approach based on feedback. I started with simple sketches in Figma, then ultimately created high-fidelity prototypes for users to interact with during my follow-up user testing.

Solutions

• Unified Platform: Designed a cohesive, integrated platform that consolidated various tools into a single, streamlined environment, simplifying access and use.

• Customizable Dashboards: Introduced customizable vertical and role-specific dashboards that allowed employees to tailor their workflows and prioritize information based on their real needs (which, not surprising, greatly differed from what leadership had originally thought).

• Feedback Loop Integration: Embedded mechanisms for ongoing feedback within the tools themselves, establishing a culture of continuous improvement and responsiveness to employee needs. (My work also lead to HealthTech implementing an “Employee Experience Center of Excellence” to continue to use HCD/UX Research to improve the employee experience)

• Updated Tool Ecosystem: My work informed the creation of a group of official “change champions,” vertical-specific + grassroots communications, and improved and more relevant trainings and other educational materials.

Outcomes

• Increased Productivity: The new, user-friendly platform significantly reduced the time employees spent on administrative tasks, allowing more focus on core responsibilities (measured through real user data and a follow-up employee survey).

• Enhanced Job Satisfaction: Post-implementation surveys indicated a marked improvement in job satisfaction, with employees expressing appreciation for the attention to their needs and the ease of daily tasks (as measured by the quarterly employee satisfaction survey implemented by HealthTech).

• Stronger Internal Collaboration: The integrated platform fostered better communication and collaboration across verticals, breaking down silos and enhancing organization-wide synergy (as measured - and witnessed!- through the ongoing collaboration of the change champion group).