My Role: Lead Designer
Summary: I led a team of 3 to fix a 20-year-old process and years of technical debt to help KLAS efficiently collect and manage surveys from healthcare professionals. I introduced and implemented a new and innovative approach to lead workshops, foster collaboration, and instill a product-first mentality through KLAS. My work started a process that led to a full-scale audit of each step in collecting, cleaning, and publishing data across the company.
Three professionals - a designer, a product manager, and a researcher - enter a company that has been in business for over 20 years.
Now, that may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but that's what happened!
KLAS Research is a world leader in delivering data and insights on healthcare IT solutions, and as the company grew so did the need for scalable processes and technology.
Over 20 years, KLAS Research specialized in manual survey taking.📝
KLAS was required to take a digital approach. Eventually, healthcare professionals and employees were frustrated at how slow and unreliable their system was.
KLAS employees were managing over $25,000 worth of surveys a year, and to say that the system was complex...was an understatement!
To better understand the problem, I led meetings, shadowed researchers, and analyzed processes to document the stress and mental load our researchers had to take during every survey collection call.
Guess what I found?
🫥 Healthcare providers are reluctant to take surveys because they are being bothered to "re-take" them.
📚 Reports are released late, causing clients to slowly lose trust in KLAS and their insights
💸 Each survey that gets rejected is money down the drain. Wasting an employee's time, developers' time, and the healthcare provider's time.
With a complex problem and a solution that would affect every department in the multi-million dollar company, I knew we had to be strategic from the very beginning.
OOUX is a methodology I certified in the same year. It is made to bridge the gap between developers, designers, and stakeholders and foster collaboration using a unified language.
It was perfect! So, we put it to work.
As a team, we tackled the problem head on working to understand what was good about the current KLAS system and what made other companies like MailChimp, Qualtrics, and Google great at collecting and managing data:
We needed to establish:
What objects will be in our solution?
What is the definition of each object?
What is the purpose of this object?
We decided that 12 objects needed to exist in our software and created a unified definition for everyone involved in the survey collection process to understand.
It wasn't enough to say we had 12 objects. My team now had 100+ relationships to design for! How were each of these objects going to work together?
By the end of our workshops, we had uncovered several assumptions that my team needed to validate about the business and our users before we could continue. If we hadn't validated our assumptions, we would have had to backtrack and make changes later, introducing technical debt.
We had a clear vision of what the foundation of our solution could look like. It was time to ask ourselves, "What will users need to do?"
This created another touchpoint with developers and the stakeholders to discover what the business needed to accomplish with each interaction and what was technically feasible for our system.
The current software didn't do much along the lines of measuring data.
You get a survey, submit a survey. That's that.
But if we were to build our own solution, the opportunities could be endless! What information could we measure that would make this system scalable and helpful for innovating in the future?
At the end of the day, we were on our way to building a 0-1 solution for KLAS Research. We had a documented infrastructure for a new survey management platform that would be responsible for helping KLAS make millions in revenue each year. Our solution was so well documented a developer said:
