One Cerner Style

Description

The One Cerner Style (OCS) initiative sought to showcase the long-term vision for a unified UI and user experience across Cerner's 300+ solutions. Our challenge was to not only uplift our UI, but to find ways to increase usability and productivity in workflows spanning multiple solutions.

Please note with the nature of this project, there are intellectual property details I cannot disclose.

Role

Within the OCS project team, my role was to contribute to the overall vision by conducting industry research, competitive analysis, providing subject matter expertise for targeted workflows within products, and road showing usability findings to executives of Revenue Cycle and Patient Kiosk as to the impact OCS could make on their products overall usability.

Process

Audit: After identifying the keywords pairings we wanted the overall experience within our products to convey. We then conduct industry audits to gain further understanding of what other technology platforms are doing. Within our auditing we targeted healthcare, productivity, and financial management products.
Moodboards: Visual moodboards were created by the entire UX organization, targeting how we can convey our keyword pairings. Included within each moodboards were explorations around branding, iconography, theming, functionality, and gamification.
Refine Visual Concepts: A small core group of UX was then tasked with crafting UI concepts using the audit and moodboards previously created. I was engaged to help critique and provide ideation support on concepts provided by other designers. ultimately the VP of User Experience at Cerner, Paul Weaver, reviewed the recommendations and selected a direction.
Test: In order to ensure we were on the right path; usability studies were run. The first study tested how accurately the refined visuals aligned to the original keywords pairings UX sought to convey. The second study then targeted how the user would navigate their workflows between different products which now shared a unified UI.

Research

Overall Attractiveness & Keyword Alignment
In order to test out the progress we were making, the Human Factors team sent surveys to several clients asking them to compare visuals of the same screens: one being of the current design and the other of our OCS visuals, rating them for overall attractiveness. With a simple UI refresh, the overall attractiveness of our products increased by 33%. Up from 49% to 82% with the OCS uplift.

With the keyword pairings being at the heart of this initiative, clients were then asked to also rate the alignment, which also showed improvement of 19% moving from 45% to 64%.

Situational Awareness & Wayfinding
For years, Cerner has been investing in creating more integrated workflows that span across product. A key concern early on was whether or not too much standardization would have a negative impact as to our user's awareness of where they were within their workflows. The Human Factors team conducted additional moderated studies to test workflows across our new unified UI. Without changing any of the workflows themselves, the OCS visuals increased situational awareness by ~5%..