The work described here was performed while I was in the employ of an Illinois MedTech firm of some 400 employees.

To check your medical records, doctors use what’s called an EHR. This employer offers a kind of add-on to EHRs, including one of the most popular in the market, NextGen. The add-on for NextGen enables doctors to curate medical records in ways that system alone cannot. The add-on came as an on-prem integration, but, in Q3 of 2023, my employer decided to move those capabilities out onto the Web. This provided an opportunity to re-imagine the product’s troublesome user experience. This is how I did that by using prototypes to elicit feedback. And by iterating based on that feedback.

Re-imagining online software can present a number of challenges — most of them purely design-related. Like understanding how best to afford desirable functionality to target personas. But some challenges arise out of legacy organizational frameworks around what UX is and who’s ultimately responsible for it. This can be especially true for orgs in a growth state as was this employer in 2024.

Companies in a growth state don’t always have working relationships established with clients outside of sales cycles. For example, they had no charter customers. This all meant my access to actual users for this effort was non-existent.

So in order to design this product, I had to understand the target persona second or even third-hand. I did this by conducting a series of internal stakeholder interviews. When user goals are known, this kind of research will often suffice — so it very much informed my first prototype.

I tested the design approach it encompassed by sending a link to this prototype out to every internal stakeholder even remotely connected to the project. These included an actual physician. And the solution’s Product Manager. The former could use it well enough but the latter felt it didn’t do enough to advance his business goals.

Then the Senior Sales Engineer got ahold of the link.

It turns out her role regularly exposed her to ACTUAL USERS of the old on-prem solution. Her feedback revealed that the user goals which inspired my prototype were way off.

I took her feedback, and the Product Manager’s, back to the drawing board and designed a whole new approach that elegantly addressed both their concerns. I then captured that approach in a second clickable prototype. And afterward used that second prototype to re-test the sales engineer who had raised the red flag. Thankfully, I was able to demonstrate that her barrier had been removed.

What we landed on was a design that:

• retained the doctor’s positive experience,

• better advanced the business goals of the Product Manager,

• and solved for the experience of the existing user-base.

This all additionally made for a good case-study I could use to help this employer re-visit some of their product design frameworks I mentioned, that were perhaps no longer serving them.