Platform Core Utility Applications

RESEARCH, EXPERIENCE DESIGN • 2022 • TraceLink

 

Summary

Administer Applications configuration for companies on the TraceLink network

TraceLink’s platform migration from the Life Sciences Cloud to Opus prompted a complete re-design of the data model and created infinitely more possibilities of how users could cross-reference and interact with information.

Combined with a long-gathered summary of our customer onboarding pain-points, the migration effort provided a natural opportunity to redesign the core setup utilities within TraceLink’s administrative areas. The original functionality was contained across multiple applications on the Life Sciences Cloud - Company Administration, Service Administration, Links, Users, Roles, and Master Data Exchange - and involved extraneous clicks and considerable latency to complete simply because of the complexity and hidden user-responses required to make it work.

The goal was broad, sweeping: create the vision of how all this data can provide more context, be more intuitive, offer more associated information where available, reduce the sheer number of redundant clicks (double-confirmation trigger warning), and user latency slowing down the process. In short, a complete overhaul, leveraging the Anthem Design System.

Design

Objectives

TraceLink’s system needs to be intuitive and provide useful context to streamline all aspects of customer onboarding and setup within the Platform, ensuring new and existing users of all skill level can confidently configure their applications on any device.

  • Ensure all existing workflows are achievable using Opus applications

  • Make the data in TraceLink easily available to the user at points of need

  • Reduce the sheer number of redundant clicks and needless dead-ends in the existing experience

Research

  • Established user personas to represent existing customers, with targeted notes based on company size, industry segment, and their level of integration within TraceLink and better design for their needs in the specific Utility tasks

  • Identified potential / future user groups from Business Analyst sessions to ensure design remained scalable to business goals

  • Workflow diagramming with technical assistants and customer services to identify onboarding maps across all aspects of our customers - from Pfizer to the remote locations of CVS Pharmacy

  • Interviews and ‘Show Me Sessions’ with customers in the onboarding process to identify the difficulties across the known user archetypes

  • Review system bugs and workflow issues reports to catalogue common issues, themes of feedback and low priority bugs open / unresolved to solve with workflow changes

Approach

Armed with the research of several years time and a backlog of requests that never seemed to make production queue, the product manager, a technical architect and experience design sat through many hours of design and iteration. The consistent theme was “make it available” and find a way to streamline - as a result, we produced multiple prototypes and brought them in front of in-house users commonly dealing with these core processes. The summary of each application’s scope of design needs was defined in an Experience Framework Presentation created collaboratively between PM, UX and Engineering and reviewed by TraceLink leadership to ensure alignment with the Network’s direction.

Once a vision was established, design began the detail work of individual flows, iterating with product management feedback and leveraging the engineering partnership to assess the realistic state of the data lake driving Opus. The experience was divided into a phasic approach for release, ensuring we built the backbone and data model correctly and then could serve the robust experience. The high fidelity and design specification work prioritized according to the product team’s roadmap, offering a phase one release experience that immediately streamlined the company onboarding, user management, and customer linking processes.

Solution

  • Using repeatable patterns within the design and a common information architecture, the experience delivered a streamlined information-on demand

  • Delivered all existing workflows for company onboarding, user management, and Network connectivity

  • Expanded capabilities introduced in recognizable patterns using expanded and consistent TraceLink terminology, allowing for rapid adoption of the user experience

  • Established analytics filters to pull live usage data in a dashboard for continued observation and iteration based on usage trends

Outcomes

Migration of the Platform Utilities from the Life Science Cloud to Opus immediately offered a reduction in time-to-completion for a number of critical onboarding and administrative capabilities needed to set up a TraceLink customer on the Network from weeks to a short series of days, depending on the company’s size and serialization activities.

These changes brought updates to workflows largely untouched in ten years, tablet-friendly experiences for the first time, and dramatic reduction of redundant clicks and dead ends in critical workflows, in turn reducing user frustration. New functionality introduced tested as easily identifiable and recognizable from leveraging the Anthem templates and common information architecture.

Key testing takeaways:

  • 78% reduction of Average Onboarding Time across tasks needed to set up a company on the Network, including GTIN verification through TraceLink’s Network Success team

  • 42% reduction of navigation back-tracking

  • 61% reduction of user bounce rates through individual steps (leave and return being a common ailment of the legacy design)

  • Users unanimously agreed that access to information was improved, with 29% discovering new product areas through the testing phase