Kirsten Disse User Experience

PROBLEM

Following on from the success of the Summary Care Record, Microsoft asked me to lead their next phase of the MSCUI Demonstrator work.

Business challenge: As the vehicle to promote the work of the MS Common User Interface programme, the Demonstrator must be clinically accurate, technically impressive and illustrate as much CUI guidance as possible and overall to be inspirational.
Technical challenge: This was to be a stand alone Demonstrator and not an industrial build, so we had a different type of technical challenge. I advocated for, and welcomed the Microsoft decision to use Silverlight a thin client with minimal technical barrier to access. Promoting new Microsoft technologies was an important requirement which we fulfilled.
Human challenge: There was a concern that the existing Demonstrator was overly complex and not promoting the programme effectively. By investing in a UX and Design led approach, Microsoft hoped to deliver a more popular and successful promotional vehicle, which we did.

PROCESS

I approached this exciting brief by first creating a lightweight experience framework, working with stakeholders in identifying key success criteria and ensuring strategic alignment between the designed artefact and the programme objectives along with high-level project management activities. I also worked closely with Clinicians, who were instrumental in determining the high-level scenario which informed the overall project and who provided crafted, aligned data. This precision clinical data enabled the project to be able to 'show' rather than the need to 'tell' the functional story and was an important factor in our success.

The fast & furious research and design phase followed a typical UX path, starting with primary & secondary research, end user interviews and contextual analysis leading to the development of personas and a clinical scenario which became the central story to the project. I created a number of diagrammatic artefacts to help share and coalesce vision, including design tenets, moodboard, evaluation framework and worked a varying degrees of fidelity from rough paper sketches through to annotated wireframes. A developer was assigned who began to point prototype some of our functionality ideas and he joined the project full-time at 3months. Followed soon after by another developer and eventually a project manager. We brought in specialist technical resource as required and conducted regular clinical and CUI team stakeholder reviews.

ROLE: Lead UX Consultant, experience framework, project management, UI guidance, website design, script writing

OUTCOME

Within six months we had gone live with V1, along with the promotional web page, script and video walk-through, on target for presentation at HIMMS and MIX and our small team was recognised with Microsoft technical and performance awards. Build: Dynamic, informal agile, small team with specialist inputs.

The MSCUI Patient Journey Demonstrator is widely celebrated for its clinical accuracy, relevance and innovative design and continues to influence Clinical interface design today. Innovations inspired further extensions and a new guidance area of the MSCUI programme, which I subsequently led.

When compared to the previous Demonstrator, our new one was:

Self explanatory & standalone
Functional enough to powerfully illustrate features – ie recorded data is populated into other areas of the demo
Clinically spot-on – realistic scenario with clinically accurate data
Has a full narrative script which explains all functionality in detail for presenters. Has a narrated walk-thru video for armchair visitors
Well received and fit for purpose – created in 2007 and still influencing Clinical interface design today
Cheaper & quicker - cost 10% of MSCUI previous demonstrator

Upon completion, I was invited to submit a case study to the BCS journal Informatics in Primary Care, PHCSG which was published.