Study Abroad Medical Portal
Our team's work with Northumbria University in Newcastle helped improve the accessibility and usability of a medical portal for patients with colorectal cancer.
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In collaboration with Northumbria University in Newcastle & COLO-SPEED, our team was tasked with evaluating the current usability of the medical web portal for participants of COLO-SPEED studies. Our findings and suggestions for future improvements were to be documented and relayed to the project director and website developer for further implementation.
Myself, along with two other UX colleagues, worked with the head study abroad coordinator & COLO-SPEED project lead as temporary team researchers and designers for the duration of our 2 week stay.
Our team began the project with a heuristic evaluation of the current COLO-SPEED web portal in order to accurately determine the necessary adjustments users could benefit from. Upon initial research, the heuristic evaluation criteria was to be based on the 10 key accessibility heuristics from Deque, which can be found here.
From the COLO-SPEED site, our team determined the three types of roles users appear as: Participant, Researcher, & Hub Manager. Below are each role's behaviors and their intentions while using COLO-SPEED.
Participants are users from the general public that have signed up to volunteer in COLO-SPEED studies.
Researchers are users in Academia that utilize COLO-SPEED to find participants for their studies.
Hub Managers & respective site staff are users with access and managerial roles on the COLO-SPEED site.
After evaluating the pages on the COLO-SPEED site, our team determined the following improvements to overall site formatting, activity, and experience:
The sensitivity of the following screens is uncertain, and therefore they have been intentionally blurred on purpose. Please reach out for a more detailed explaination of findings from the heuristic evaluation.
Although a consistent style guide is implemented, some site behavior doesn't quite align with user expectations. We suggest improving the consistency for dates, titles, and layouts to standardize usability across the site & more closely match user jargon.
Navigation on the COLO-SPEED site is fairly straightforward, but missing or out-of-order navigation elements prevent users from parsing through studies effectively. Additions such as consistent back buttons and tweaks to the site map structure would contribute to improved usability, especially for aging users.
Error prevention is another key aspect of the web portal that is in need of improvements - too many errors inhibit users from properly reading the content on the site. Removing unnecessary ticket types and adding filter / sort functions give users easier access to information that's important to them.
Another needed improvement to COLO-SPEED is the structure of certain interactive elements such as time tickets and tabs. Below are a list of changes that should be implemented:
One of the last usability changes our team wanted to see implemented was adjustments to the readability of the site. A change from a list view to a gallery view would be necessary for improving the site.
In combination with a heuristic evaluation, our project sponsors were in need of well-thought-out workshop activities to conduct with users after our stay abroad. These workshop activities were focused on gauging user thoughts on the COLO-SPEED site, as well as fostering ideals of value and notions of creativity for future iterations. Below is the list of workshop activities our team designed:
Goal: To evaluate the layout and efficiency of the ColoSpeed website portal from the perspective of a new user in order to find challenges for said users.
Examples of tasks to complete:
1. View a user’s currently enrolled studies.
2. Withdraw from a user’s currently enrolled study.
3. Send a “Request Details” ticket to the Hub Manager.
4. Update your family history of Rectal Cancer.
5. Opt-out of “Events we are hosting to share our research findings with the public” emails.
Goal: To establish a meaningful connection between participants and the ColoSpeed Project by surveying users about past medical interactions and their expectations while participating.
Questions for participants to evaluate their interactions:
1. On a scale of 1-7, how well did ColoSpeed work as an organization set to gather research on a specific type of disease that affects the aging population, such as rectal cancer treatment?
2. Why did you give it that score?
3. What specific aspects of the experience affected your score?There are a few similar organizations that gather research on a specific type of disease that affects the aging population. Of these (listed above), how do they fulfill their promise?
Goal: To discover the difference in vocabulary and terminology between participants (general citizens) and researchers, and simplify the language used universally across the ColoSpeed web portal.
Tasks to Complete:
Similar to “walking probe” you are having users define words along the way of determining importance
1. Browse through different pages of the website and highlight on sticky notes the terms you believe are the most important/valuable .
2. Group these words into different categories .
3. Write the meanings of each words on the back of a sticky note .
Goal: To provide our team with useful context and common ground by attempting to come up with design solutions using brief stories about a user using the ColoSpeed portal to complete a specific task.
Goal: To use the capabilities of AI language models to enhance the feature list currently implemented in the ColoSpeed web portal. The results of this design support will be verified by participants of the ColoSpeed Project.
Consent: “We are going to conduct a brainstorm session in order to learn more about how to properly incorporate consent into a web-based medical portal. ColoSpeed is a web-based medical portal designed to create a community around rectal and bowel cancer. Participants are over the age of 55, and after receiving their colonoscopy are offered to be included in studies to further the research in rectal cancer. Participants are selected based on a researcher’s study requirements, but they are allowed to withdraw their consent at any time. How can we emphasize that our participant’s consent is beneficial to themselves and a wider scientific audience? Please provide a list of solutions.”
Design Speculations: “We are going to conduct a brainstorm session in order to generate new ideas that could benefit our participants of a web-based medical portal. ColoSpeed is a web-based medical portal designed to create a community around rectal and bowel cancer. The portal offers a suite of features, such as Personal Details, where users can provide the criteria needed to be selected for particular studies; My Studies, where participants can view studies they are currently (or potentially) involved in; and a Ticketing system, where all users can message each other, make announcements in studies, or contact researchers for further inquiries. What are some potential new features that could be incorporated into ColoSpeed that can benefit all stakeholders? Please provide a list of solutions.”
Returning Participants & Users: “We are going to conduct a brainstorm session in order to learn more about how to keep our participants to continue to use our web-based medical portal. ColoSpeed is a web-based medical portal designed to create a community around rectal and bowel cancer. Participants are selected based on a researcher’s study requirements, but they are allowed to withdraw their consent at any time. How can we retain our participants and keep them using ColoSpeed? Please provide a list of solutions.”
Our team's two big deliverables were both formatted for text-based insights, so much of our findings are better fit for documentation. Below are representations of the two deliverables.
This was my first project working in a domain that was unfamiliar to me (international healthcare), and although I did not have much experience in the field as I came in, I left with a newfound respect for UK citizens, their healthcare system, and the efforts made to develop a center for nationwide colo-rectal cancer study. If I had the opportunity to work on this project again, I would make the following adjustments:
I'm thankful for everyone at Northumbria University for giving myself and my peers the opportunity to explore new ways UX can be applied into various fields, as well as Purdue University for the chance to learn more about international domains.
