Overview

**My Role:** UX Researcher, Instructional Design
**Tools:** Miro, Sketch, InVision, Adobe Creative Suite, HotJar, Maze
**Timeline:** January 2020-October 2020

Background

With the growing need for telemedicine services, hear.com provides remote audiology appointments to customers all across the United States without having to leave their homes. Audiologists and Hearing Instrument Specialists (HIS) have begun to get on board with the new technology, but are still facing numerous problems with the hear.com process and software. Hear.com wants to give audiologists and customers an experience as close to an in-office visit as possible. Research into the daily habits of hear.com staff and into the customer's experience is crucial to building a state of the art interface.

The Goal

Developing a new process is fraught with numerous issues, (i.e. technical issues, gaps in information, and inefficiencies in the process). The objective has been to research the essential information audiologists need to provide the customer with the right hearing technology with minimal effort from the customer. This research has assisted in understanding root causes of process disruptions, special handling of customers, and key insights into product returns. Although I am the only UX researcher, I have worked closely with the product team in Berlin (Product Managers, UX and UI designers) and business team (Managing Director, Product Manager) in the US. For this discovery process, we made an effort to use best practices for our research while also juggling a fast scaling business with high needs and demands.

Personas

There were numerous personas to consider. Based on conducted research and countless interviews, each persona provides good insight to the pain points, motivations, needs, and goals of each user. From Audiologists, Patient Care Coordinations (PCC), to customers and their family members. All personas were important to understanding the full spectrum of needs and issues. However, hear.com was most interested in understanding the needs of the hearing care professionals, which varied based on occupation.

Journeys, Task Flows and Affinity Maps

With the assistance of our product manager, we created task flows and journeys of various processes. Creating journeys helped us to identify gaps in the process and magnify gain and pain points we needed to understand. Our journey maps enabled us to focus our interviews to deeper understand issues with partner satisfaction. The results of the qualitative research were fruitful in helping us understand breakdowns in the process. We will be incorporating the insights from our research into the new software, journeys and flow charts to provide a more efficient and supportive process. Understanding the providers journey is essential to having a successful appointment.

Observing User Behavior

An important part of creating a better interface was understanding how providers use our current interface. Using HotJar, we were able to see heat maps and click maps, illuminating problem areas in the interface. From these maps, we discovered technical issues and work arounds in the main fitting software that was slowing down the process. We have also begun to administer moderated and unmoderated usability testing through Maze to test out new features.

Qualitative Interviews

We interviewed providers and internal hear.com employees to understand the issues. We received rich feedback from all participants, which helped us to understand how important it is to have a structured, transparent process. Everyone had similar qualms with scheduling and communications, as well as citing a lack of a documentation process to be the major issues. The interviews also help us to understand which of the issues found could be solved with simple fixes, and which would take some changes in software and technology that were not as easy to fix.

Instructional Design

Because this can be a complex process and many of hear.com’s customer base are between 50-80 years of age, many guides and instructions were needed to help both providers and customers understand a simplified step-by-step walkthrough of processes. While the plan remains to create interactive versions of these guides in the future, static guides are being used now to help guide customers through the events in the process. With the help of audiologists, we created many guides as shown below.

Next Steps

This was a challenging undertaking from the start, due to limited collaboration opportunities and a lack of providers (COVID-19). However, this situation was counter-balanced by COVID-19 as well; tele-audiology has been growing rapidly since COVID-19 made it necessary to have remote care options. The research into these topics is vast and ongoing. Moving forward, more research insights are needed to understand specific problems that have surfaced such as high rates of return, no shows to appointments, and ongoing payment issues. I will also continue to administer usability testing of new prototypes and features as designs continue to progress. In order to provide a great experience for customers, we have made an effort to create an accessible platform while considering WCAG guidelines in all of our new designs.