MyChart

Creating a new patient-to-doctor messaging feature

Helping patients communicate with doctors and navigate their messages

Background

MyChart is Epic’s patient experience app, with over 100 million users worldwide.

Timeline

Project to overhaul the patient-to-doctor messaging experience. June 2018 - Jan 2021

Role

Coordinated QA, usability studies, and client feedback for the project.

*all design work and mockups by Chris Pokrzywa

Skills

Usability testing, user research, client communication, functional testing, visual QA

Introduction

Problem

There were several reasons for this overhaul effort, both internal and external:

As a company, users and customers that the MyChart UI felt cluttered.

For such a heavily used feature, the activity was outdated in terms of appearance, usability, and technology.
MyChart was in the process of consolidating its web and native experiences into shared features with React, and our web and native experiences at the time were significantly different from one another.

Goal

Create a consistent and modern messaging experience shared between our web and mobile platforms.

Numbers

Over the course of this project, we created 5 different iterations of usability studies and facilitated over 60 total tests.

Highlights from the usability process

The new layout

Early user interviews led to a breakthrough in the feature’s main design.

I coordinated an initial round of user interviews with 5 participants, using early mockups. The main takeaway: Users had trouble understanding the general flow of the feature.

We regrouped with our UX designer, who proposed a more conversation-friendly layout using speech bubbles. The new design approach received great feedback from then on, from both users and clients alike.

Getting buy in from clients

I created an ongoing webinar series to keep our healthcare systems involved with the project.

As a B2B enterprise company, it was important that clients were prepared for upcoming changes. I coordinated a webinar series that gave a project overview and also let customers be involved with decisions. Each webinar had its own topic, such as:

Parent-child communication management
Conversation layout
Inbox management

Up to 100 customer reps from major healthcare systems in the US attended each session. Not only was their feedback useful, but the webinar generated a lot of excitement and buy-in which can be a huge challenge.

Expectations for message replies

I organized extra interviews and focus groups to confirm expectations around the speech bubble layout.

MyChart messaging was currently an asynchronous process; a live chat didn’t exist yet. Internal stakeholders were concerned that a speech bubble UI might put pressure on doctors to reply more quickly.

We added a debrief question in an upcoming task study to address this concern, to which most patients responded that they didn’t feel like the conversation was live. While tricky to fully know how this would play out after release, we felt comfortable with moving forward after interviews.

Validating the design

Our final rounds of testing confirmed we were heading in the right direction.

With mockups finalized, we planned for another testing effort with a larger pool of users. Working with our UX designer, I created a task-based study that was completed by over 45 recipients at our major annual users conference.

The test validated the two main flows of the feature: Sending a message to a doctor, and sorting through the inbox. Results largely confirmed we were heading in the right direction, with some minor changes to a few elements such as message recipient context and family access settings.

Outcomes

The MVP was shipped with the Feb 21 version of MyChart. I left the company before any clients had upgraded to that version, but the project had already received very positive response from client and internal stakeholders

Project reflections

This project was a massive undertaking, and this case study only highlights some of the bigger usability efforts I organized. Some lessons learned:

Include clients in the process early on.

For any B2B product, it’s important to keep clients updated and involved with certain decisions. Not only was it valuable feedback, but clients appreciate the effort. The successful client work we did on this project set a precedent across the team.

Tension in design can be OK.

“Number of clicks” was a common usability metric at Epic. While our design included more clicks than before, it was done in a way to help the user be intentional about what they were doing. The absence of that intention was a common pain point we had heard about the previous UI.

Thanks for reading!