Valence Health

Team

  • Role: Associate UX Specialist

  • Team type: In-house

  • Team size: 2 (the creative director and I)

Company

  • Company: Valence Health

  • Company size: 1,000+ employees

  • Client count: 40+

Ask me how I...

  • Adapted to a fast-paced and demanding environment.

  • Was an advocate for usability at Valence Health.

  • Initiated a change in the UX process to create a more formalized and structured workflow.

  • Brought company-wide visibility and awareness to the UX team.

  • Worked collaboratively with product owners, product managers and engineering teams in an agile environment to produce value-based healthcare solutions.

His success led him from an intern to a promotion, being only the second employee in the organization to achieve that type of success. I would highly recommend considering Sammy as a modern User Experience Specialist to revolutionize your organization's product(s).

-O.H. via LinkedIn

 

Here's my story:

I began my journey at Valence Health as a UX Engineer Intern in June of 2015. By the end of the Summer, I was offered a part-time position during my undergraduate senior year as an Associate UX Specialist. Being a part of such a small UX team came with many constraints, but afforded me the opportunity to quickly excel within my position. The UX team at Valence Health was embedded in the Population Health Department, allowing us to work closely with product owners, product managers and engineering teams throughout the entire product development life cycle. The team was stretched thin across four major products (also some minor products that are not listed here).

Strategy and Collaboration

  • Worked with product managers to understand the current market and competitor strategy, contribute to release planning and roadmap development.

  • Worked with product owners to understand business goals, user needs and collaborate in weekly design solution meetings.

  • Worked with the engineering team to ensure that product development met UX standards and was an accurate representation of the prototype.

Documentation

Developing personas and creating site maps and task flows in Visio allowed the entire product team to better visualize the end design, while keeping the end-user and their goals in mind throughout the entire process.

Documenting personas helped represent major user groups for the given product. Having personas documented gave a sense of purpose to the product and added a "real person" with backgrounds, goals, values, giving a clear picture of their expectations when it comes to using the product. Site maps organized the structure of the product and provided a visual display the hierarchy of the various elements within the product. The team was able to refer to the site map for planning, navigation or other organizational purposes. Being able to refer to a site map also improved the feasibility of creating task flows. Task flows were especially useful in working through concepts and ideas. Documenting these allowed the team to visualize the "happy path" or the steps that we foresaw a user to take when navigating through the product to complete a specific task.

Sketches

Sketching served as a quick way to visualize concepts and grow on ideas.

Prototyping

The UX team used Adobe Dreamweaver to prototype our products. We referred to the prototype as our "protosite." The entire front-end of each product was entirely built by the UX team, while also creating library items, global stylesheets and other assets to make prototyping for future design a faster process. Having the prototype in an entirely clickable, high-fidelity, HTML/CSS/Javascript environment helped all stakeholders better visualize the end-product and gave a more realistic interaction in demos.

Testing

Although the company did not budget for formal usability tests, the UX team ensured that some type of testing was done on prototypes to catch any possibly missed usability flaws before sending it off to the engineering team. We relied heavily on guerilla testing in the office to get feedback on design.

In early 2016, Valence Health launched a program called "Visioneers Collaborative." During these meetings, clients are asked detailed questions about various use-cases and for feedback on designs from the current roadmap of our Vision product. These collaborative sessions allowed the product team to listen to the client and see where they were having problems in their workflow, allowing the team to develop stronger, more useful products.

Products

Vision

A web-based, clinical integration and population health solution that aggregates data across the continuum of care so to provide a comprehensive database from which analytics and reports can be accessed - such as patient registries, lists of patients with gaps in care and lists of patients with services coming due - as well as patient support tools and outreach.

vCare

A web-based system that provides support for both Utilization Management and Case Management programs.

  • The Utilization Management function provides a coordinated workflow for the receipt, review and determination of benefits authorization requests, taking into account member eligibility and clinical criteria, and is a platform for collaboration across RNs and Medical directors to document and communicate qualified decisions.

  • The Case Management function enables the assessment and generation of individualized care plans for Case Management candidates who are referred to the program by providers, or identified through claims stratification.

vCore

A centralized repository with near real-time processing that supports data enrichment for hospitals, health systems, and physicians who require integrated data to effectively manage patient populations, merge clinical and payer data, drive business intelligence and promote value-based care.

vQuest

A population analytics intelligence reporting tool, which allows users to efficiently identify economic and clinical trends and easily understand their inherent basis. Allows for clients without access to financial data (payer claims) to perform in-depth cost and utilization reporting.

 

UI Work

Aside from making user experiences great in Valence Health products, I also did a little bit of UI work. I've become a master at creating iconography and color charts.

What did I learn?

Working at Valence Health has given me a well-rounded real-world experience as a user experience designer. I was able to embed myself in an agile environment, across a suite of population health products in order to revolutionize the development of value-based healthcare solutions through an iterative process. In order to succeed in my position, I had to adapt quickly.

From the beginning of my journey at Valence, I was expected to adapt to enterprise brand and UX standards in order to maintain consistency across future designs within each product. Working so closely with colleagues that were a part of the development life-cycle, I gained confidence in my ability to fight for my user and act as an advocate for usability. Adobe Dreamweaver was a great asset, as it helped me discover new ways to prototype web-based systems with HTML, CSS and Javascript; ultimately, making prototyping an easy and rapid process, which came in-handy for real-time prototype updates during design meetings.

Being a part of a small UX team has allowed my voice to be heard and I was fortunate enough to have the ability to introduce new ideas and design conventions that Valence Health products have never seen before. I've had the opportunity to create and document design standards and reinvent the UX workflow. My experience has been invaluable, as I was able to take initiative to introduce modern UX methodologies and workshops into a larger organization—like Valence Health—at such an early stage in my career.