ktalk: an online community for young adults with chronic kidney disease

Submitted by maureen on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 23:22
in
Client: 
National Kidney Foundation of Michigan
Role: 
Site Designer
Methods: 
Mind Mapping, Personas & Scenarios, Wireframes, Mockups, Visual Design, Drupal
Summary: 
Designed and built an online support community for young adults with chronic kidney disease.

Young adults with chronic kidney disease struggle with anger, depression and feelings of isolation coping with an illness that is most common among the elderly. The National Kidney Foundation of Michigan (NKFM) has a successful peer mentoring program to help young adults and reached out to researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information to expand this program into an online support community. To kick-off the project I led an IDEO-style deep dive brainstorming session with peer mentors, NKFM administrators, and the research team. From this session I created a site concept document with site goals and characteristics, personas & scenarios, information architecture, and wireframes. With feedback from this document I significantly scaled back the sites’ features developing a final set of mockups as well as the site’s community guidelines and management plan. The site was built in Drupal by myself and 3 programmers using a modified Agile development process.

Results: 
The site went live to peer mentors and participating young adults on February 20th. Members are actively participating in the site. One member changed dialysis methods based on another member's recommendation. Paper on project will be presented at the 2010 American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium.

Clinical Library: Redesigning an enterprise knowledge repository

Submitted by maureen on Wed, 09/30/2009 - 01:15
in
  • Kaiser Permanente logo
  • Clinical Library Taxonomy Algorithm
  • Clinical Library Information Model
Client: 
Kaiser Permanente
Role: 
Project Management and Usability Intern
Methods: 
Business Objectives, User Requirements, Content Analysis, Information Architecture, Usability Testing
Summary: 
Internal project manager for the usability analysis and redesign of the Clinical Library, Kaiser Permanente’s prime knowledge repository for clinical information.

For over 3 years Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute has worked with user interface consultancy Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A) to redesign the Clinical Library so that it better fits the needs and workflow of time pressed clinicians. As the internal project manager I gave AM+A feedback on their designs and facilitated discussions of the designs with physician stakeholders from Kaiser’s 6 regions. While AM+A worked on UI elements of the redesign I focused on the information architecture of the site. I analyzed search statistics, WebTrends and, using an application built by the internal IT department, had each region sort all the documents in their collection. Using the sort data I completed a comprehensive content analysis, testing the proposed faceted navigation for the site. For user testing I defined the characteristics of users to be tested and number that needed to be tested, scheduled participants, wrote user test questions and reviewed final user testing script and mockups.

Results: 
The detailed content analysis I conducted resulted in a site taxonomy that better fit the information seeking behavior of clinicians. The faceted navigation user interface was dramatically simplified due to elimination of unnecessary filters. Problems I identified in this analysis were later verified through user testing.

Casepedia: A web 2.0 medical case repository enabling collaborative learning

Submitted by maureen on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 20:05
in
  • casepedia_logo_ekg
  • casepedia_homepage
  • casepedia_upload
  • casepedia_search
Client: 
Grant Opportunities [Collaborative Spaces], University of Michigan Digital Media Commons
Role: 
Interaction Designer
Methods: 
Contextual Inquiry, Survey, Competitive Analysis, Wireframes, Prototype, Graphic Design
Summary: 
Designed a prototype for an online repository for physician-contributed medical case studies.

Our interdisciplinary team received a grant to build a prototype that would allow medical professionals to publish, comment on and classify authentic clinical cases. I completed a competitive analysis of existing online case repositories and online health communities and helped develop survey questions. Based on findings from the competitive analysis and semi-structured interviews with physicians I created wireframes in Omnigraffle. These wireframes became the template for the prototype built in XWiki.

Results: 
Poster for the project was presented at the 2008 American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium.
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