Healthcare news app
Creating an internally facing news app for NHS professionals
The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) is the professional body for finance staff working in healthcare.
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It's a charitable organisation that promotes the highest professional standards and innovation in financial management and governance across the UK health economy through its local and national networks.
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I was approached by HFMA to provide discovery and UX for a new news app. With a wide ranging use base and with industry specific information that needed to reach the right sectors and locations, it was a complex project in terms of IA and filtering, personalisation, and making that seem simple to the user.
Step 1: A personalised app that served the right content to the right audience
For 70+ years, HFMA have provided independent support and guidance to its members and the wider healthcare community.
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However, in many cases, this support and guidance was offline. The target audience for the app was nurses, consultants, doctors and NHS directors - who are understandably a busy bunch! They also needed to fulfil CPD requirements and keep up to date with the latest news in their particular area of expertise.
This was where the app came in - as something to help them do all of that, in an efficient and user friendly way, showing only the information they found useful, when they had time to read it.
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The other consideration in making the solution easy to use was speaking to the intended users to replicate the colours, symbols and terms they use on the 'shop floor' - i.e., on the wards, making the app familiar and consistent with the wider CX journey.
Step 2; IA, navigation and location
Though the app needed to appear simple on the front end, in terms of content, there was a lot of complexity. The news displayed to each user needed to be relevant to their sector, location and careers stage.
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The best way to achieve this in a new app was to create a robust IA and content groupings that were familiar and easily filtered at the set up stage (with the option to tweak in settings, and useful - not annoying - prompts and nudges based on usage one the app was set up and in use).
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I split this into 3 steps at set-up:
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Step 1 - Choose your region
Step 2 - Choose your topics
Step 3 - Choose your networks
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Step 3; Content and filtering
Once I had put together the IA and uploaded all news items, articles needed to be tagged and assigned filters so that they could be pulled into the correct content buckets - the UX of the CMS was as important as the FE in-app experience as content editors would need to make sure all content was assigned correctly, and displayed correctly on both Android and iOS.
The colour coding was also important in terms of replicating what was familiar on the existing site, and also what was familiar to NHS staff on wards, displayed physically on the whiteboards they used day to day.
The really important part here was user testing - I ran this as a workshop and allowed free chat rather than an interview-style structure, and gained some great insight which I passed over to the design and development team at HFMA along with the frames, supporting user stories and spreadsheet of content
Outcomes
I delivered a package of frames, a functional prototype and supporting documentation for iOS and Android
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I produced a user testing report to explain all decisions made, relating these back to specific functional user stories for development
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I briefed design (including accessibility recommendations) and handed over to the HFMA internal team, providing additional support for a month where required
Testimonial
'Natalie joined Felinesoft as a UX consultant. She arranged and facilitated engaging workshops with end users and stakeholders for various not-for-profit companies, scripted and conducted individual user interviews, and presented to clients clearly and confidently, keeping everyone engaged and involved along the way.
She also worked closely with design and dev teams, making sure everyone was on the same page. A pleasure to work with'.
Ralph Johnson, MD - Felinesoft