Executive Summary
👩💼 Client: Inera.
🎁 Product: 1177.se’s Feedback And Complaints Service.
⌛ Time Frame: eight weeks (2022).
👥 Team: Amin Amini, Cecilia Parkert and Tine Persson.
🧑 My role: user research, heuristic evaluation, user testing, wireframes, prototypes in Figma.
🎯 Mission: to evaluate and improve Feedback And Complaints, 1177’s new national service for filing healthcare complaints.
🏗️ Process: a heuristic evaluation by the was conducted to identify user experience issues with the service. User testing where six participants used the service to file complaints was then performed. Several redesigns with wireframes and prototypes were created for to address the identified UX issues with Feedback And Complaints.
🪄 Results: 11 major design solutions were created to improve the user experience of the complaints service. These solutions are currently under consideration for implementation.
A new 1177 service for filing healthcare complaints
Inera operates 1177, Sweden’s national platform for healthcare information and digital services. 1177 offers millions of citizens healthcare services such as making appointments, getting digital treatments and reading their medical journals.
In 2022, 1177 launched Feedback And Complaints (”Synpunkter och klagomål”), an online service that citizens can use to file complaints about the healthcare that they have received. Once a complaint has been filed, citizens use the service to directly communicate with the relevant clinic or the regional patient advisory committee.
Feedback And Complaints is a crucial service as it’s one of the major channels in which citizens can make their voices heard on serious healthcare matters and, ultimately, get proper healthcare.
The mission
My team of three user experience designers was tasked by Inera to work on 1177’s recently launched Feedback And Complaints service and specifically:
- evaluate how the service works from an user perspective on desktop
- identify usability and UX issues
- suggest improvements to the service.
Overview of the Feedback And Complaints UI
Once Citizens have logged in to 1177 and picked Feedback And Complaints on the start page, they use the service accordingly:
- They select if they want to directly contact the offending clinic healthcare or get assistant from their regional patient advisory committee.
- They select the actual clinic they want to file a complaint against.
- They describe their case by filling in the complaint form.
- Once the complaint is submitted the user is presented with the confirmation page. New messages from the clinic show up in the user’s 1177 inbox and the user also replies through the inbox.
Process
Here’s an overview of how we went about evaluating and redesigning 1177’s Feedback And Complaints service:
The user testing was instrumental in uncovering observable UX issues with the Feedback And Complaints service. Our six test participants were between 26 and 75 years with an equal number of men and women. By recruiting an elderly person with low computer literacy, and an immigrant with Swedish as a second language, we attempted to uncover the needs of particularly vulnerable groups in society.
Redesigning Feedback And Complaints
These are the key design suggestions that the team created for 1177’s service Feedback And Complaints based on the results of the heuristic evaluation and user testing.
A note on the redesigns
The redesigns on this page are not implemented on 1177 nor endorsed by Inera, 1177’s owner. They simply are design suggestions created by the design team.
Adding an onboarding experience
It was challenging for test participants to understand the underlying healthcare system and complaint process that the service is designed to support. The design team suggests a completely new onboarding that explains the process in a clear and concise manner while allowing curious citizens to learn more about the service.
Simplify the choice of complaint recipient
Early when using the Feedback and Complaints service, the user needs to decide who should receive the complaint that they are filing: the clinic responsible for the complaint or the regional patient advisory committee.
Our research indicates that users found it difficult making an informed decision as the difference between the two choices were unclear.
In one out of several redesign versions, we created a wizard that would suggest a recipient based on choices that are important to the user.
Wait, that’s selectable?!
Searching for and selecting the healthcare clinic at fault is a crucial choice that people have to make when using Feedback And Complaints. During our user testing, we noticed that once users found the clinic, actually selecting it proved difficult because of low affordance. This is especially problematic as it means that the user cannot progress using the service:
Our redesign simply focuses on improved affordance when a person selects a clinic:
Lessons learned
Design handover: The design team’s findings and redesign suggestions were presented to key Inera staff which responded very positively to the problem analysis and design suggestions. Some of the design suggestions were taken into consideration for implementation. The design team considers this a success as 1177 and its services are part of a critical and complex platform were changes need to be made with great care.
Desktop centric design: The design team did not perform any user tests on mobile as project scope was limited to desktop by Inera based on the assumption that using the service would mainly be done on desktop due to the complex nature of filing healthcare complaints. Insights from the user tests leads us, however, to believe that the mobile version of Feedback And Complaints also needs to be evaluated.
User privacy and testing: Due to privacy laws, the user tests were based on a fictional case with test accounts which obviously affected user behavior and interview replies about Feedback And Complaints. Conducting future user tests with real citizens, cases and patient-healthcare interactions would unveil more complex issues and needs.
Inclusive design: Having marginalized group representation is particularly important for critical infrastructure like 1177. The design team, for instance, recruited several people who represent marginalized groups such as the elderly or people with Swedish as a second language. The challenge is how to balance the needs of many marginalized groups and corporate realities like deadlines and limited resources at our disposable. In hindsight the design team should have had more participants than six for the user testing but our deadline made this difficult to realize.
