Cole Latimer

I was tasked with designing a cloud-based note-taking tool for the mental healthcare industry. This app would be available anywhere the therapist goes, on their phones, tablets, and laptops, to take Progress Notes while in session, with pre-filled templates to speed up their paperwork. 

This app also had a messaging system modeled after Slack, where team members can chat, or hand off files to colleagues in a totally secure space; a mobile-friendly app called Scribbles, which allowed a therapist to take quick notes with a stylist, or by the keyboard, that they could clip to a client file, that would follow them into the office, or out in the field; and a robust dashboard that helped them keep track of all the clients in their practice, their daily schedule, and their completed progress notes and intake forms. 

We even created an account management for HR/internal use, like onboarding a new clinical therapist, turning on their IT permissions and passwords, a calendar/scheduling app for administrative and front-desk teams, as well as client-specific tablet-based onboarding workflows that made intake to inpatient easy and intuitive for the therapist as well as the client.

Skills and Practices

· User research: Personas, User Interviews, Qualitative data, Analysis of existing product.

· Workflow and Wireframing: User workflows, and desire paths explored and quantified for simplification of the new stand-alone product.

· Lo-fi and high fidelity design: Rapid iterative design, prototyping, and presentations to sales, CX, and users before we built out product with engineering.

· User testing: A/B testing, in-person interviews, quantitative and qualitative studies.

· Offshore and remote teams: I worked with PMs in Arizona, and in India, as well as engineering teams in Texas and India. 

· Agile/Lean: 2 week design sprints.

The original software was very old, created as healthcare accounting software, locked to a desktop computer, added onto over the years with no UX research, and wasn't easy to navigate.  It crashed frequently, was slow, needed constant updates, and required dedicated administrators/help desk personnel, and the training period was long and arduous. We wanted to give back 1 day of time to therapists by making their documentation easier, intuitive, and portable. 

In order to understand the customers, I trained on the old product, going through exactly the same type of onboarding a new customer would do. In discovery, I found that to best meet the needs of the customer, the therapist, we could simplify the product, focusing on the user, and designing for their typical day, and supporting that throughout every task.

Building the new app required end-to-end product design on my part. Working with the systems architect, we explored Material design, Bootstrap, and landed on Blueprint.js, a react-based design system. We customized that to match the new brand guidlines, and created a design system the offshore and local engineering team could access to build out the desktop and mobile apps. 

Some of the best features on this clinical documentation product, were:

· Customizable, inline shortcuts for predictive text

· Rich text editor

· Bells, the AI assistant that was always learning

· Scribbles, the informal rich text note taker

· Scheduler

· Responsive onboarding: iPad/tablet, and mobile friendly UI 

all while saving the therapist a day of paperwork, made this a success. 

Working in 2 week design sprints, a little under 2 years, my team completed the dev work for the note taking app, messaging app, patient portal, and the informal scribbles app, scheduler, and client administration.

The company was acquired and the app is still in use today under the umbrella of Netsmart.