For a little over a year I have worked on a collaborative chat tool called Watson Workspace. Workspace is focused on providing seamless team communication while also using Watson Technology to help sort through the “noise” so common in persistent chat tools. To do this it uses natural language processing to surface information important to each individual user and highlight what’s most important. By doing this the user can quickly catch up and stay aligned with the team.
Here is a quick overview of workspace:
Workspace is being designed to help work teams collaborate together to achieve shared goals. The following personas are being used by the design team to provide the most value.
At IBM I am a hybrid UX Researcher and Designer and have also been working to develop use cases for different industry solutions. Some of the things I have worked on are listed below. The bolded topics will be discussed on this page.
UX Design Replies & Topics
I was tasked with designing the experience for replies and topics in Workspace. In a conversation within a team space there sometimes is a need for a side conversation or a smaller focused group effort. That is where replies and topics come in.
Replies are a good way to have a side conversation but don't have the structure and permanence needed for a more goal oriented effort. That is where topics come in.
Primary & Secondary Research
I started this effort in a few ways. I did some market research to see what tools were currently on the market with a similar functionality. I did an audit of tools like slack to see how replies are currently used.
The lead researcher and I created a script and conducted 30 user interviews to see how user's prioritize and organize information in their conversations.
Hypothesis
From this research we realized with the addition of replies and topics there is a possibility that the way spaces are used currently will change. As a hypothesis, replies will help to focus the conversation by allowing side conversations to be nested in the transcript. Topics will reduce the number of spaces currently created since they will be organized within the spaces themselves.
I also wanted to make sure that the replies/topics experience was not just something that would fit into the current experience but that the components would continue to work with all future workspace components. I mapped out this experience with those coming down the pipeline to see where there was possible overlap.
Use Cases
After some basic ideation I broke the experience into pieces to make sure every edge case was accounted for. I also developed use cases to help assist me develop the UI.
I did some low fi mock ups and then created the following screens in sketch. I also worked with the developers to ensure that all the UX was achievable and to plan for the components that would take more time to develop.
Experience Web
Experience Mobile
Strategy Watson Workspace + Watson Care Manager
I am currently working on a collaboration effort between Watson Workspace and Watson Care Manager (team within Watson Health). The goal of the project is to incorporate Workspace into the Watson Care Manager dashboard and create custom "lenses" for healthcare. This means that workspace will now be able to use NLP to identify topics important to a care manager or the care team and surface them in the conversation.
Framing Question: How can we customize the collaborative capabilities of Workspace to assist care teams to develop and maintain long term care plans for patients?
The rise of complex, chronic diseases has created a new demand for care management. More than half of Americans live with at least one chronic disease.
When I began working on the solution with Watson Care Manager I first wanted to understand the healthcare landscape. My team worked to identify macro trends that had the capability to affect healthcare. Then we worked to understand what exactly a care manager did.
We researched how health care professionals are currently collaborating together and what tools on the market are available to them.
Research
We interviewed health care professionals in all different areas of medicine, including doctors, nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, case managers, medical students, etc. We also interviewed people who plan or manage large amounts of information in their jobs including a wedding planner.
For each interviewee we broke down our findings into 4 categories: observations, needs, problems and opportunities.
From these findings we created empathy maps and personas to help guide our designs.
Value based care has had a big effect on the demand for care management. We also realized from our research that people in many different occupations identified as care managers so we created a "care management spectrum" to help us understand the field.
Big Ideas
While working on this effort I realized collaboration within a care community is the same as collaboration within any other team. The major difference is privacy. HIPAA compliance and securing access to information within EMR's are two guiding principles to this process. At this point we went into ideation for design ideas.
General Pain Points in collaboration & healthcare
The following pain points were my my guiding principles as I went about creating MVP use cases to pitch to the healthcare team.
There was one common theme that came up that really stuck with me as the north star for this effort. It was that care management is too often about data management instead of patient care. It is an important statement for me to keep in mind especially during the more technical/political phase of the product. To help push this effort forward I developed the following use cases as an MVP approach to pitch to Watson Health. We are currently working towards a solution that will be developed in the near future.
MVP Use Cases
