Siemens Healthineers: The Digital Incubator & Humanics

The first product offering of Siemens new digital incubator was Humanics. With future plans to create a productivity platform for medical professionals the first offerings positioned Humanics as a communication platform for nursing teams to plan, manage, and track department schedules.

Role: Senior designer, tasked with redesigning underutilized workflows. Research support, including site visits and discussion guide preparation. Strategic support, promoting the incubator; for example we traveled to the Cleveland Clinic to put on an innovation workshop and to encourage a co-creation relationship.

The right information, at the right time, to the right person…

Now Screen Redesign

Target User: Nurses

Role: Lead designer and research support

Problem: The right information turned into all the information in a way that you can’t parse and didn’t account for how much the nurses would use the functionality of the app and end up dozens of cards. This was caused by the hybrid system of widgets and notifications where the bricks had different interactions based on the context. This led to confusion and difficulty organizing and finding value in the screen from our users.

Solution: Our research showed that users wanted to treat the list like a list of to-dos and notifications. In both cases having a logical sorting and a way to dismiss everything allowed the freedom and control our users wanted. I simplified the function allowing all cards to be dismissed and instead of giving priority to different cards they are all ordered by when they were created. Additionally the cards are bucketed to reduced the amount of clutter on the page.

Challenge: Utilizing Neilson’s 10 usability heuristics we determined that ‘User control and freedom’, and ‘Consistency and standards’ could be improved to help the user understand, navigate, and control the now screen. The existing product was agnostic, neither a notification page or a set of widgets. The users seemed to prefer a list of tasks and notifications so this round of concepts explored that solution. What we realized is if we went this route we would have to make the widget like items functionality available in other sections like the ‘Open Shifts’ marketplace. This turned out to be a simple problem since it fits so well as a toggle on the calendar page.

Transfer Staff Workflow

Target User: Nurse Supervisors

Role: Design Lead

Problem: Being a nurse is hard, nurse turnover is a major problem healthcare organizations deal with. A simple workflow we didn’t have enabling a nurse to easily transfer between departments. If it’s for a promotion, to change things up, or to switch shifts transfers are common and Humanics had no way for users to do it manually.

Solution: This started simple, provide a simple workflow so nurse managers can transfer their staff between departments. This grew into addressing the disjointed onboarding process, and the staff profile page to increase usability and remove information that wasn’t needed.

The medical community is great at counting clicks as a representation of how long a task takes. Needless complications are adding time to their day when they try to make every min count. Adding a second step to the onboarding process saves the managers about 5 clicks, not much but an easy win for our users.