The document discusses the expansion of DesignOps at athenahealth from focusing only on supporting product design teams to also optimizing communication and collaboration across teams. It describes how athenahealth conducted usability reviews on 55 workflows using Nielsen's heuristics which found over 3,000 issues. This led to improvements like reducing the steps for a claims edit workflow. The company also created knowledge tagging and a research council to further support teams throughout the product development process. In the future, athenahealth aims to continue optimizing experiences across their different product areas through a DesignOps approach.

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S t r e t c h i n g
the definition of
DesignOps
Chris Moses
Director, Product Management
athenahealth

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NOW
W
ITH
PRODUCT!
S t r e t c h i n g
the definition of
DesignOps
Chris Moses
Director, Product Management
athenahealth

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Some background...

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6. "We literally built a company proudly
on the fact that we had bad software."

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Photo by Martin Jernberg on Unsplash

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Photo by Martin Jernberg on Unsplash

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Many years of great success

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Photo by Jared Erondu on Unsplash

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Photo by Jared Erondu on Unsplash

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Clinicals
(EHR)
Collector
(billing)
PopHealth ...

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Clinicals
(EHR)
Collector
(billing)
PopHealth ...
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
team
team
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team

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TACTIC
Provide teams with systems
and support.
STRATEGY
Enable the product teams to
innovate and execute.

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85 people: 75% product design 25% design ops

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● Managing efficient onboarding of new scrum designers
● Offering educational tools, support to improve design skills
● Identifying new UX tools, managing licenses
● Productive user panel + recruitment for UX studies
Quick(er) wins

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Photo by Martin Jernberg on Unsplash
?

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MISSION CRITICAL
WORKFLOWS

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55

28. ∙ I
1 DAY 5 DAYS 1 DAY 1 DAY2 DAYS
2-week “audit” sprints

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Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics

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HOW’D WE DO?

33. 🙀

34. Heuristic Avg. Score
Negative
Findings
Match Between System and Real
World
1.1 410
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use 1.3 302
Error Prevention 1.3 291
Consistency and Standards 1.8 463
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design 1.7 337
Recognition Rather than Recall 1.6 221
Visibility of System Status 1.8 275
Help Users Recognize, Diagnose
and Recover from Errors
2.0 82
User Control and Freedom 2.2 102
Help and Documentation 2.4 82
55 workflows. 3,250 findings.
Billing Staff 1.0
Billing Manager 1.1
Practice Manager 1.1
Management 1.3
Front Office Staff 1.7
Provider 1.9
Care Manager 1.9
Nurse 1.9
Clinical Staff 2.0
Patient 2.5

35. 4 pages & 10 steps 1 page & 4 steps
~50%
reduction
in time on task
Impact on “Claim Edit” workflow

38. We built an app for that (thx Google App Maker!)

39. We built an app for that

40. We built an app for that

42. 2.4

43. 2.4 2.3

44. 2.4 2.3 2.6

45. 2.4 2.3 2.6 2.1
😱

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LESSONS LEARNED

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LESSONS LEARNED
● What’s a “good” score?
● Do we care about the number,
or just the improvement?

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LESSONS LEARNED
● Focus on the heuristic
findings, not the number
● Your goal is improvement, not
any particular threshold

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52. Research Council
Forge Design System
Supporting product teams throughout the SDLC
Discovery Experiment Alpha/Beta Generally Available
Systems

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● What do we know
about X?
● What are we doing
about X?

55. Collector
(billing)
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
Tag knowledge by product, zone, and team?
x Collector x Claims x Claim Edit
PRODUCT ZONE TEAM

57. DesignOps?

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Clinicals
(EHR)
Collector
(billing)
PopHealth ...
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
team
team
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
Optimize communication and collaboration?

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Clinicals
(EHR)
Collector
(billing)
PopHealth ...
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
team
team
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
zone zone
team
team
team
team
team
Optimize communication and collaboration?
Global Experiences

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Thank you :)