Project Overview
The Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS), is a constituent management tool used by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PCAN) and their call center, Patient Central. CTMS allows users to create and manage constituent contacts and clinical trial information as well as produce reports that can be used to provide insight into the success of initiatives within the organization.
As a first step to planning enhancements for the tool, we set out to identify CTMS user behaviors and workflows, understand the role Patient Central plays in the overall organization and learn what pain points currently exist for CTMS users.
User Research, Product Strategy | Pancreatic Cancer Action Network | March 2016 - June 2016 (3 months)
Heuristic Evaluation
I, along with 2 members of my team, conducted an evaluation using Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics to determine the success of the current CTMS user interface. My team was able to determine 3 main areas of weakness in the tool: navigation, aesthetic, and form implementation.
Excerpt from the heuristic evaluation, rating each by a pass-neutral-fail metric.
Ethnographic Research
We traveled to Los Angeles to perform 8 in-person observations, 3 group sessions and 5 stakeholder interviews with Patient Central associates, managers and other members of their team.
Synthesizing Our Findings
Archetypes
We created archetypes to maintain detailed records of CTMS users and inform all future changes and enhancements. We captured aspects of individual job roles such as general educational backgrounds and personality traits as well as interactions with the tool itself.
User Scenarios
We also documented user scenarios in order to understand the tools and knowledge necessary for Patient Central associates to complete a task and highlight some of the challenges they face. Every call is unique, every constituent is unique, every associate is unique, but capturing high-level and common scenarios allowed us to understand how best to improve the system.
New Constituent Phone Call user scenario map including notes surrounding unique complications we noticed along the way.
Primary Takeaways
After performing this research, my team was able to produce a roadmap for enhancing the CTMS tool, articulate the benefits of each feature enhancement and understand how the tool fit into the organization as a whole. We were able to uncover issues within CTMS and other systems that cause time-consuming workarounds and duplicate efforts.
The information gleaned from talking to our users and watching them use the tool led to the team's ability to make informed design decisions as we began our work of enhancing this complicated system. To see a case study of one of these enhancements, follow the link below.