Client: 3M
Platforms: Webapp
Tools: Axure, Sketch, Jira
Processes: Collaboration, User Research, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team: Nathan Nash, Danielle Truckenmiller, Poeuth Pann, Amy Unklesbay, Erin Mourning
Summary
3M’s Digital Oral Care business group began building its Oral Care Cloud SaaS to satisfy the functional business needs of its stakeholders. This project allows orthodontists who use 3M products to store patient records and manage the creation and fulfillment of aligner production. I worked in a team that included a product owner, UX researcher, two UI designers and myself. My role was the UX designer, and it was my job to turn business requirements into a functional, interactive prototype for usability testing.
Discovery
Working with 3M and it’s in house design agency was a great experience. As a contractor for their Digital Oral Care business group, I worked with 3Ms in-house design team.
Each morning, I met with the design team to participate in a discovery session. During these sessions, we would work through the requirements on a whiteboard. At the end of each session, I documented our progress and created a to-do list using a Kanban-style application in Office 365.
After the meeting was over, I began to create wireframes of the work we did on the whiteboard. The following morning, I presented the wireframes to the team to receive feedback and to continue working through the other features.
Design
I designed wireframes in Axure, based on business requirements from the product owner, notes from meetings and feedback from my team members. Each morning at the end of our working sessions, I would begin designing the wireframes. I created a component library in Axure in order to expedite the development of the prototype. This library was based on a style guide that worked with Axure’s repeater functionality to mockup a table based off of the Kendo UI grid.
User Research
At the end of each sprint, our design team would test the prototypes that I developed. We tested the prototypes, in order to demonstrate that the designs were usable by medical professionals. Using our own network of qualified participants, we conducted in-person usability testing. I observed and graded the participant’s performance in our task scenarios.
Conclusion
I learned about usability testing methods, and how to conduct user research in an in-person, administrative setting. Genuinely, users don’t seem to read. In certain contexts, you need multiple affordances in order to ensure that the user can successfully complete a journey. The most challenging aspect of the project was managing multiple complex interactions within Axure. Additionally, I initially struggled with the programmatic aspects of Axure. Through research, I was able to figure out how to pass data through variables in order to simulate a realistic, complex form. I love working with well organized, and energetic teams. My working group within 3M’s Oral Care department amazed me with their level of efficiency and individual performance.
