The Challenge

User research is a fundamental part of the design practice at Humana’s Digital Experience Center (DEC). Each product we create is shaped through a regular schedule of user research and usability testing sessions. These weekly sessions keep our focus on the people who use our software. The designers at the DEC take a lean approach to usability testing, focusing each session on learning what needs to be done for the next. Keeping the research process simple and lightweight helps the design teams move quickly and learn from users each week while still handling the implementation and other design responsibilities.

Challenges

Documentation can be cumbersome

The challenge is how to effectively document and share the research findings with collaborators and stakeholders without compromising the teams speed and agility. Our design teams use a diverse set of tools and techniques to prepare for and document research. The tools are used inconsistently between teams and products. Documentation is often time-consuming and cumbersome to create and the results were often lost to someone’s inbox or an obscure network folder.

Additionally, as a human-centered approach to software (and user research) becomes more common at Humana it becomes increasingly difficult to find and access relevant research from other teams. As teams begin to integrate user research into their processes they are often looking to understand best practices and reference research from similar products.

We needed a tool for tracking and communicating results from user testing with their teams, external collaborators, and stakeholders.

The Process

Starting with an open-source solution

While our team was working on the MyHumana Login project we needed to find a means of sharing our research and the design decisions it was influencing with interdependent teams and stakeholders from across the company. During that time I attended MidwestUX 2016 where Chris Avore, head of product design at NASDAQ, gave a talk on increasing the value of user research in a large organization. One of the tools he presented was a website his team had built to document and share user research.

The site, which they had dubbed ‘Mosaiq’ was open sourced and available on Github. Our team forked the project, customized it to make it more relevant to health insurance than stock trading, and gave it visual update. We rechristened the site ‘Personify’ and used it as an opportunity to test the concept of a dedicated research site with minimal investment in development.

Solution and Impact

A secure internal repository for research findings

This first incarnation of Personify was a little difficult to use, unstable, and not as secure as we needed it to be. But it proved that having a central place to store and share user research was valuable to our product teams and stakeholders.

Knowing that a site documenting and sharing research would be valuable to our team and help other software teams in the company adopt human-centered practices we began developing a new version of Personify. This version would live on Humana’s network and give all associates access to user research.

Using research to understand our researchers

Appropriately for product focused on user research we began the redesign process by having conversations with our existing users, other teams that were actively doing user research, and teams that were only beginning to include it in their process. It was challenge creating a product that balanced the needs of veteran researchers that also helped inform and educate beginners.

Personify was developed quickly by a small team. We continued to document the research we were doing on Personify in the tool as it was being developed, and this made our team especially empathetic to the users’ problems.

Continued learning through pilot program

The initial beta was launched in under 2 months. The team used the ongoing feedback of the pilot group to prioritize new features. This ongoing feedback helped ensure that the product was meeting the needs of the diverse teams of researchers, designers, and developers that were using it across the company. Ultimately, in a short period of time we created a lightweight, private, and secure knowledge base for user research at Humana.

Innersourcing and on-going development

Following the pilot our teams are sharing more research. It has also lead more teams to begin doing research. The Senior Vice President of our engineering organization is a primary champion of the product and with his support Personify has been innersourced so that the software development teams that are using it can contribute to the product.