Video Application - Chiron Health

Bespoke video chat application used for tens of thousands of appointments

TL;DR

Chiron Health's bread and butter revolves around scheduled video appointments between doctors and patients, but the legacy video chat experience wasn't cutting it. I worked with two frontend engineers to completely redesign and rebuild the video application from scratch. Our appointment success metrics went from 80% to 98%.

The Brief

By the time I started this project, the existing video experience was a few years old and hadn't been changed much beyond the MVP. It had been used successfully for thousands of appointments, but it was starting to show its age. Metrics also pointed to the fact that our clients were in need of an upgrade: appointments were only being started and completed successfully about 80% of the time. Despite tweaks to the codebase and experience, we couldn't budge that number much with what we had to work with.

The Audience

Our users covered a wide range of technical savvy and abilities, on both the patient side and the provider side. Extra care was needed to make both parties feel like they knew what was going on at all times, and to help guide them through solutions when unexpected things came up. We needed to give patients and doctors, adept and impaired a great experience.

The Solution

New technologies and video SDKs had emerged in the mean time, and we took the risk to rebuild the whole video experience, start-to-finish, from scratch. Out went old video platforms and jQuery; in came a modern video SDK and React.js.

Contextual Information

The legacy video experience suffered from having either too much or too little contextual information at any given point. With this redesign, buttons were moved into expected locations, well-known icons were used in place of blocks of text, and everything slid out of the way when it didn't need to be seen.

It Works Everywhere

The next challenge was designing a UX that worked on all screen-sizes. This video application had to be wonderful and functional in everything from a 300x250 pixel wide floating window to a full-screen ultrawide monitor.

Future-Proofing

I designed the UI first to be very flexible from a future-proofing point of view. I took care to not place elements in certain spots so that I could add to those spots with future features.

Error State Handling

As anyone who has had a video chat will tell you, bad things are prone to happen during the course of the conversation. All manner of network and hardware issues can crop up on either end of the conversation, or somewhere in between. We worked with some incredibly thorough QA folks to help us understand all of the ways that a video call could go sideways. I designed error states for almost every scenario imaginable.

Technical Challenges

While we were designing and developing this application, the browser spec kept changing on an almost monthly basis. We spent quite a bit of time working around the technical limitations of multiple browsers who had different specs at different stages of implementation. Our goal was to provide a great (and mostly similar) experience no matter what browser was in use.

What I Learned

I'm incredibly proud of what we accomplished with this application. My hat is off to the frontend developers who made this come to life and work as solidly as it does. Some takeaways:

• Quality frontend developers are severely underrated. If you find one to work with, hug them and never let go.
• I underestimated the degree to which browser (in)capabilities would affect us along the way. Having constant collaboration with developers helped keep us on track and on time.
• Design systems are worth all the effort to build and maintain, even on project-level designs.

Practice Landing Page Generator - Chiron Health

Lead-gen marketing pages for Chiron Health clients

TL;DR

Medical offices aren't historically the best marketers. We wanted to build a landing page for all of our 1000+ clients that they could use to help drive telemedicine appointments. We needed a way to build and host all of the pages, and we needed designs that would be flexible and universal enough to work for all of our disparate practices.

My Role

I worked with a graphic design contractor early on to help us establish the types of elements and messages that would be effective for patients. From there, I evolved the design to what it is today. I built a backend administration site using Ruby on Rails that took a pile of settings, logos, and colors, and spit out a unique landing page. I also built the landing pages themselves to be responsive, themeable, flexible, and full of logic that enabled different experiences at the practice's choosing. Once we had that up and running, I worked with backend engineers to expose an API that would allow another Chiron application to hook into this and create landing pages automatically.

As the backend site is full of proprietary information, I cannot show it here, which is a shame because it is both beautiful and functional.

The best way to experience one of the landing pages is to see it in action.

What I Learned

The project was a resounding success from a marketing and client-success perspective. There are over 1000+ landing pages hosted here, and we've seen massive traffic and appointment request volume through this channel. Our clients also love these because it saves them the hassle of adding a page to their website and setting up a telemedicine-specific request form.

Things I learned:

• Flexibility is an oft-misunderstood and underestimated constraint. The more flexible something is, the harder it is to keep it beautiful and functional.
• If you make one part of a landing page dynamic, the CEO will ask for all the parts of the landing page to be dynamic.
• At scale, automating something as simple as building out a landing page will reap massive rewards for everyone involved.

Appointment Billing Application - Chiron Health

Fixing healthcare, one video visit at a time

TL;DR

Insurance and medical is complicated and messy, and doctors generally hate dealing with it. I was asked to design an experience for busy doctors who just ended a video appointment to quickly understand the state of a patient's insurance and bill accordingly.

The Brief

Doctors are busy folks and would rather provide care (i.e. get to the next appointment) than muck with a patient's insurance information to figure out how much to charge for an appointment. However, our platform relied on collecting some situational awareness about the appointment from the doctor. That information would either be used to charge the patient through our platform or pass the job onto a user in charge of billing.

Medical insurance and billing is a field fraught with complexities, legalities, and tedium. Most doctors have such distaste for dealing with insurance that they employ people in their offices to take care of it all for them.

Despite doctors having such a distaste for billing, we wondered if we could give doctors enough contextual information fast enough for them to make quick decisions about billing. If we could, and they could give us this info, it would lead to a much better experience for all involved — the patient and the doctor.

We had rich (and mostly accurate) data about the state of a patient's insurance plan when the video appointment ended, and we knew other metadata about the appointment, such as length and frequency.

The goal was to create an experience that gave the doctor:

• Instant contextual information about the patient's insurance
• Intelligent defaults and a single call-to-action button
• An escape route in case the doctor couldn't make an informed decision at that moment
• Flexibility to change the defaults to handle exceptional cases

The Research

This feature didn't require as heavy a lift on the research side, but there were multiple interviews with our reimbursement specialist. She was instrumental in helping me course-correct throughout the design phase.

The Designs

The main challenge I faced was coming up with a design that handled the dozens of states a patient's insurance could be in.

Additional complexity came from also needing to handle variables that our practices had set, such as disabling insurance processing completely, or customizing a set of practice rates.

I worked with two very talented React developers to create an interface that was flexible and powerful. ...and buttery smooth.

What I Learned

While this was immensely tedious at times, this project remains a bright spot for me. I credit the success of this project to the tight collaboration I had with frontend engineers, backend engineers, and our reimbursement specialist. Through this project I gained a whole new perspective on the velocity and momentum a well-functioning team can achieve.

Doctors overwhelmingly enjoyed having and using this feature. The data points to doctors using it ("Charge Now") in the vast majority of cases rather than using the "Skip..." escape route. In streamlining the billing process, practices got paid faster, practices fielded fewer billing questions from patients, and appointment volume increased as platform confidence increased.

Pijn Pages

A powerful platform that turns videos into interactive campaigns

TL;DR

I was responsible for the Systems Design, UX, UI, and Frontend Development for a niche landing-page-generating SaaS application. I took a concept full of complicated use-cases and came up with something elegant and profitable.

The Brief

My client wanted to create a campaign builder that would allow him to quickly create video-based campaigns. These campaigns could be used by clients for lead-gen, sales team compensation tracking, training, marketing, etc. They would also collect engagement data and generate graphs and dashboards of all the metrics that his clients cared about.

The idea was a good one that had been proven. It was time to turn a very manual process into an automatic one, and one that his clients could eventually use by themselves.

I was brought on alongside a good friend (and brilliant developer). The client and I worked together to turn his idea into something that was achievable, scalable, and profitable. I handled the product design, UX, UI, and frontend development; my colleague handled the backend architecture and API.

Our goal was to create an application that would:

• Allow an administrator to create and manage clients/organizations
• Allow clients to log in to see and export campaign engagement data
• Enable clients to build and edit complex campaigns with a few mouse clicks
• Generate a fully customized, responsive, and adaptable public-facing campaign page

The Research

The smart folks behind Pijn Pages had been bootstrapping the idea by manually building campaigns every time a client wanted to spin up a new campaign. He came to us to drastically simplify the number of steps it took to generate a new campaign landing page.

The benifit of dog-fooding his idea for months was that he came to us with a good sense of how users interacted with campaigns, what was important to his clients, and the similarities between all campaigns. He knew who his ideal user was and how they'd use the application.

This allowed us to jump into wireframes and flows very quickly.

The Design

We knew we'd need to design a place for Administrators and Campaign Owners to log in to manage/build campaigns, and a series of public-facing pages, including the campaign landing page that would get generated.

My client had a great aesthetic sense and a real passion for making the Campaign Owner's experience beautiful and usable. That tipped us in the direction of designing and building everything from scratch.

I started with the core of the Campaign Owners' experience: the Campaign Builder.

My goal was to create an admin UI that was beautiful, flexible, and scalable. Once I spent the time to nail down the IA and structure of all the editable bits, I got to work designing and building the frontend of the campaign builder.

Most of the fields of the campaign builder come with intelligent defaults, allowing a campaign owner to launch a fully-functional campaign in less than a minute. To make that speed and simplicity goal a reality, the campaign builder had to be matched with an insanely flexible public-facing campaign landing page design.

The campaign page handles variability like a champ. Besides being fully responsive, it can gracefully handle any combination of settings and preferences, including color scheme, content of any length, and completely disabled sections.

Behind the scenes, there's an elegant and scalable architecture collecting form submissions and user engagement data. All of this data is presented back to the campaign owner on a customized dashboard that allows them to see results in real-time.

What I Learned

This project taught me how to design for flexibility. When the project started, we had a loose idea of what success looked like. But as we continued to build and show the client what we were capable of, we couldn't help but suggest technical solutions to solve business constraints or supercharge his business plan.

The greenfield design part of this project was a ton of fun, but it taught me quickly the value of not designing myself into a corner. I had to make sure the designs were flexible enough to handle whatever brilliant idea we threw at it.