Frontier Health helps innovators expand their reach by connecting with over 200 healthcare providers and clinics around the world. Anika works with innovators to assess product and market fit and supports them through the distribution process, down to the last mile. Innovators are able to get the feedback they need on their products from the field to make them better.

What the current onboarding experience looks like: It’s all manual. Anika collects information through a form and processes them herself. She will then have a one-on-one phone call to screen them.

Let’s compare and contrast: Now that we understand the company’s business model, we sought inspiration. The first thing I said to my team was, “Can we name examples of great onboarding experiences?” Two companies came up as obvious: Etsy and Airbnb. Analyzing their flows allowed us to identify traits of great onboarding experiences.

Ahad did a phenomenal job of working through each of these companies’ onboarding flow (making a dummy account and following the step-by-step process) and mapping it out for us in the below visual, as well as the PDF compilations of each screen. From there, we were able to easily analyze the best parts of the flow.

What we learned in Stage 1:

1. Ask the client a lot of questions in the beginning! Having those initial conversations with the client about the business model and how it works was crucial to developing a deep understanding of what we were working with. I based my questions from InVision’s “Difficult design questions to ask your new client” and Tomer Sharon’s “Questions I ask every startup founder that wants UX feedback.”
2. There is no shortage of inspiration out there. There isn’t a product exactly like Frontier Health so finding inspiration required a bit of creativity. In this quest, listing out companies we admire got the ball rolling. As a team, we figured out which companies dealt with the UX of a marketplace well.
3. B2B businesses are complex. Companies like Uber for Business and Lexis Advance focuses on conveying their value propositions through well-tested copy writing and it works!

Before going into the UX research phase, we developed assumptions about our users’ pain points to figure out what we wanted to test and validate. This gave us a high-level overview of what users struggle with and a sense of how to prioritize their needs.

Prior to this project, Anika and her team of advisors gathered names and contact information of innovators that we could speak to about their product development experience and working with third-party distributors. I reached out to the innovators via email individually, introducing the project and the team and requested a brief window of their time for a user interview.

Ariella facilitated a total of four initial user interviews over the phone. She started out by asking about the innovator’s background and how they got involved in med-tech. The conversation got more specific when they discussed the product development process and challenges involved regarding sales and distribution. Finally, she closed the interviews with debriefing questions. Some questions we asked:

Our user interviews revealed two main categories of users: (1) our early stage med-tech startup CEO and (2) an operations lead for a later stage startup. We created a quick persona for each to humanize their pain points and help us with developing scenarios as we take them through the Frontier Health storyboard.

What we learned in Stage 2:

• Invest in the users’ problems. We spent a lot of time refining our user interview questions so that we could gather insightful feedback. I did a lot of research on how to do user research so I was well-equipped with the tools to make the best use of our time. Some of my favorite articles are listed here.
• Design the UX of interviewing users. Since we dealt with busy med-tech professionals, we were intentional about not wasting their time and making it as easy as possible for them to share their experiences.
• Research is magical. Despite the fact that we had our assumptions, interviewing users reveals many pain points we never initially considered. Letting users talk uncovers a plethora of information. User feedback led to a lot of conversations with the client about rethinking the project scope and strategy.

During research, we gathered a lot of feedback on the users’ pain points. Before sketching a set of wireframes, we storyboarded the end-to-end journey to better understand what onboarding to a third-party distributor looks like and where exactly the pain points are in the process. There are a lot of moving parts between product development and last-mile delivery so it made sense to outline the users’ story.

Redesigning the flow: The priority for our initial redesign of the flow was to pull our users in through a compelling value proposition page and then guiding them through an onboarding experience that matches their expectations. We want the easy stuff to come first and leave the cumbersome items for last, with an option to do it later if they can’t be bothered with it.

Sketching out wireframes: At this point, we were all overflowing with ideas so each of us decided to sit down for twenty-five minutes and individually sketch out our first set of wireframes. Silent sketching is an activity used in the design sprint model and is proven to be an effective use of time and effort in ideating. It didn’t matter how pretty the sketches looked – it just needed to communicate an idea. This was not a competition of who was the best artist. Good design should be self-explanatory and have excellent copy.

Sketching with our stakeholders: As I publicly documented the design process on this page, Anika has been closely monitoring the progress we made since the beginning. She was also involved in every major decision-related conversation and let her give us the best input from the CEO point of view. We’ve presented her with the user findings and recommended different ways to approach the problem by discussing the risks and implications. When we discussed our pre-prototype sketches, our client took a sharpie and a sheet of paper and sketched out some of her own ideas.

I believe that every CEO should feel empowered to look at data and sketch their ideas so this was an important moment for all of us. I love that she embraces the design process as a way to improve her company. I’m convinced that we did an amazing job showing the best of what design thinking has to offer. On the flip side, we’ve admired how passionate Anika is when it comes to solving global health issues. Personally, I didn’t care about it before but now, I can’t stop thinking about it!

What we learned in Stage 3:

• Be intentional about alleviating cognitive load. It’s important to analyze the users’ happy path and only ask for information that is absolutely necessary. Each piece of information that Frontier Health asks for needs a purpose. The onboarding experience should never feel daunting.
• Some user pain points might not even be fixable (or the cost of “fixing” them is too high). Rather than to dwell on this, the best thing that we can do as designers is to decrease the emotional distress. Giving them assurance when they experience anxiety can be a huge relief, leading to great UX.
• Silent sketching gave us four great designs, as opposed to one. There were some things that all four of us had in common. There were also unique features that we each came up with that displayed examples of great user experience.

We analyzed our wireframes (particularly focusing on the heat maps) and picked features to be included in our initial prototype. At this point, the client’s goal still was to automate the onboarding process.

Ahad and Krizia put together the first set of digital wireframes that incorporated all our ideas into one flow. Ariella and I helped them fill in the boxes with the words. Since we were involved in the user interviewing process, we were familiar with the language that our innovators felt comfortable using.

We put these screens into an InVision project and created our first clickable prototype. I reached back out to some of the innovators for a follow-up interview (as well as new innovators we haven’t spoken to) so that we could test our prototype for usability hiccups and general feedback. Ariella designed the UX of testing the protoype and facilitated a couple interviews. We used GV’s “Five Act Interview” as a guideline for facilitating tests. Here’s what they had to say:

We conducted more usability testing to figure out what worked and what didn’t. In this round of testing, we asked questions that were more specific to the messaging and how each section on the page made them feel. This helped us isolate the copy that really resonated with them and which didn’t.

The beauty of working on a copy-first landing page is the ability to get absolutely nitty gritty with the language we used. By asking users specific questions that goes back to the messaging and copy, we got a solid sense of how they felt about Frontier Health. We wanted the language to reflect Frontier Health’s brand as a trustworthy platform to connect a disaggregated marketplace of medical device innovators with a global network of health care providers and clinics.

Ahad and Krizia worked together to clean up our final prototype before presenting it to the client. Their eyes for pixel-perfect visual designs brought everything together. When I reviewed the final prototype and shared our process with the client, I felt like each of us on the team had significantly contributed to making this happen. The client was blown away by our dedication to creating a page that truly resonates with the innovators she works with.

What we learned in Stage 4:

• Some users felt compelled to directly give us suggestions on how to improve. While implementing their ideas might be useful, it’s more valuable to consider the problem that is stemming from it. It’s one of those “asking for a faster horse and designing a car” situations.
• Integrating content strategy should have come earlier in the process as to not waste time when testing a prototype. We got better and useful feedback once there was some form of copy on the page as opposed to placeholders with “lorem ipsum.” (Read: “Death of Lorem Ipsum” by Luke Wroblewski) Innovators cared significantly more about the messaging and why this service is relevant to them rather than how it visually looked.
• Testing a prototype before building the actual thing mitigates risks significantly. If we didn’t realize how scammy the language was or the charity vibe we gave off, we might have lost many potential customers before they even knew how unique Frontier Health is.

To wrap this all up, I found this project to be extremely gratifying and useful for my career development for several reasons.

– Anika’s passion to solving global health problems is contagious. We committed to advocating for her business and learning more about the innovators that drive the company.

– “Simple UX” is anything but. So much research and testing goes into creating a seamless experience and I felt like we achieved that with our final prototype. Our earlier prototypes feature a crazy amount of writing and unnecessary information but this process allowed us to trim it down to exactly what is needed to get users excited to join the Frontier Health network.

– Team harmony is essential. I loved every minute of working with them. Each of us brought a major strength to the table and were not afraid to use it. I also loved seeing everyone step outside their comfort zones and challenge themselves. The visual designer conducted user interviews. The research expert learned Sketch overnight and single-handedly prototyped. The developer took messy information and magically created a workable spreadsheet.

– We need to empathize with our team, too. As designers, the first thing we learn about UX is advocating for users and empathizing with their pain points. All of us were on the same page about making the work easier for each other and making sure that loose ends were taken care of throughout the process.

Thanks so much for reading! If you have any questions or feedback, I’d love to know. Send me an email and let’s chat.