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Allscripts Care Director

Bringing usability and accessibility to an outpatient care coordination tool

The CD team that I joined had been a development-driven operation whose sole design instructions were to do "whatever is easiest for them". This resulted in many UI inconsistencies.

My role

Initially I was brought on to add usability direction. But moving the team toward a user-centered design thinking approach is my real task. Beginning by researching user processes within existing tools I built a picture of their "real work" (this user research also informed the Care Director Plan project). I involved the entire team in observing user testing and shared the real words of users with them on a regular basis. I put together an extensive product usability style guide to empower development teams to make effective design decisions.

The result

While a wholesale redesign has not been possible, much of the usability has been improved as the product moves toward showing the patient as a whole person rather than as silos of data. Because of these modifications CD has been able to move into overseas markets whose standards for accessibility are higher than those in the U.S.

Care Director Plan Case Study  |   Experience Transformation Case Study  |   Additional writing about Care Director