The Challenge

Medical billing users are creatures of habit. Most of them have been in their current positions for decades. As a result, they are very resistant to change. Because of this, re-designing an app can be a difficult task. 

The team did not have a UX or a UI person involved in this app's initial process, and it showed. Instead, they made reactive changes to the UI based on solutions suggested by the users, trying to make everyone happy.  

They asked me to make it look pretty.  After auditing their existing site, I had to report to them that this was more than a re-skin. Their CSS was all inline; they had broken API calls and other developmental issues.  They were so concerned with the timeframe, convincing them that a good UX design and architecture infrastructure was an uphill battle.

The Process

I needed to come up with a strategy to buy them more time. I asked the product team to contact their most opinionated, hard-to-please users for user testing and feedback. Through my years of experience, I find that including the user (especially the users who don't like the app) and making them feel part of the process builds trust. It worked. We started with some surveys and feedback, which made our users excited and bought us some time. Not changing the UX entirely, I reprioritized the hierarchy of data.

I worked with the developers to leverage code components from an existing internal application to speed up development time. I customized the components from our use cases.

With this approach, we were able to do series of rapids prototypes and user test sessions.

The Impact

The users loved the approach and results: total buy-in and a win for UX by a company that didn't understand the value. As a result, the renewal and new sales of this app went up.