StudyTeam for Sites

Improving Site to Sponsor Communications & Workflow Management

A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND

During the clinical research study life cycle, many site users (Clinical Research Coordinators, Study Managers, Principal Investigators, Research Nurses, etc.) need to collaborate and coordinate with their colleagues in order to complete the trial cycle. In order to properly manage work plans, reporting, and timelines, many site users utilize task management tools such as paper, spreadsheets, and other software tools.

IDENTIFIED PAIN POINTS

Sites
Time-consuming data entry in multiple locations, to-do lists that keep getting longer, and are difficult to manage across multiple tools and applications.

“I don’t have time to do data entry in multiple locations and return my Sponsor’s calls.”

Sponsors
Sites are not updating and reporting critical data.

“My sites aren’t returning my calls. I’m not getting the data I need.”

STATE OF THE PRODUCT

Task Management
Users can create tasks within StudyTeam. The task feature allows team members to assign to-dos to themselves or to team members, and attach relevant data and notes.

Based on product usage data, we can see this feature is rarely used, and if it is, users tend to create tasks but not complete them. Currently, the application does not remind them or notify them of unfinished tasks.

Notifications and Reminders
Customers are only able to unsubscribe from email notifications via the email themselves, and cannot set global notifications settings in a preference service.

HYPOTHESIS

If we improve workflow management (and reduce stress over “things to do and report”) in the StudyTeam eco-system, we can improve the frequency and efficiency of data being reported back to Sponsors.

TIMELINE

6 months +

MY ROLE

Work closely with my product managers regarding project scope and requirements as design lead

Collaborate closely with team members; involve technical leads, developers, stakeholders and product owners in design reviews, feedback cycles, and research synthesis

Market analysis and product research regarding best practices in workflow management tools (notifications, user preferences, email reminders, and more)

Gather insights and interview product customers

Present and gather feedback to and from stakeholders

Synthesize user interviews and stakeholder feedback into MVP designs

UX and interaction design

Test and iterate on MVP designs

Finalizing all visual designs and integrate and deliver new patterns into our design system

INITIAL DISCOVERY

As part of our research and discovery, we had several regenerative discovery sessions with stakeholders and customers. These calls were focused on understanding what individuals are doing to get the job done today.

Insights from discussions with the customer team
The customer team currently has to manually subscribe and unsubscribe customers to various emails. This is a time-consuming process.

“I wish our customers could opt in and out of emails themselves, without me needing to go into the system for them.”

Insights from discussions with our customers
Customers don’t use the tasks feature in the site application because there is no way for them to set a reminder, due date, or notification.

“If I receive too many emails, I get overwhelmed. It’s a lot of noise and I end up just missing a lot of them or not even opening them.”

Based on our discovery sessions, we proposed and scoped out the following solutions across various initiatives.

PROPOSED PRODUCT SOLUTIONS

Task Management
Based on the feedback that site application users don’t use the task management feature due to the inability to create reminders and set custom notifications, we started exploring injecting these enhancements into the current feature.

Notifications and Reminders
Customers are only able to unsubscribe from emails via the email themselves, and cannot set global notifications settings in a preference service. To remedy this, we started exploring ways for users to be able to set their own settings and preferences for their trial communications.

LEVERAGING RECOGNIZED DESIGN PATTERNS

Rather than reinvent the wheel, we applied existing and validated interaction notification patterns.

Throughout our several design iterations, validation, and testing – we kept the following in focus:

1. When everything is important, nothing is important
2. Users should always feel in control of their notifications

TASK MANAGEMENT FEATURE

VISIT REMINDERS

After the task reminders feature was released and well received and validated by users, we applied the same pattern to a different feature, the visit scheduler with some enhancements.

These enhancements had been previously usability tested but did not make it into the initial task management scope for the first release.

See my working Figma file here to see iterations & prototypes used for testing and validation.

USER PREFERENCES

Entry Point
After analyzing various entry points and locations in the app, we decided on a global location for the user settings and preferences. This entry point allows users to access their settings and preferences, no matter what site or trial they are logged into.

This location defines a solid UX foundation and anticipates the scaling of a fully flushed-out preference service that will include other things like calendar settings and integrations.

To see view additional logic behind this decision, you can peak at more flows here.

Trials
Once a user selects, ‘My Settings’, they land on their Trials page. Here users can indicate which trials they are actively working on. Users will not receive email notifications and reminders for trials indicted as in-active.

Email Preferences
Under Email Preferences, users can select what types of emails they’d like to receive for the trials they are actively working on.

This greatly improves previous processes, which required a manual opt-in and opt-out process between the customer team and customers for individual emails.

interaction flows for user preferences development discussion and hand-ofF

See my working Figma file here to see iterations & more prototypes used for testing and validation.

EMAIL STANDARDIZATION

In an effort to standardize and unify our branding across product emails, I spearheaded documentating guidelines for design, product, and development.

View my design documentation here.

GUIDELINES FOR THE ORGANIZATION AVAILABLE IN CONFLUENCE

PRODUCT EMAILS WITH APPLIED STANDARDS

CONCLUSION

These features influenced an overall increase in user adoption and engagement, with a 391.7% change in unique email opens leading to 80.9% change in updated patient logs out of 89.3% of accounts.