Design the right thing: how Concept Validation’s little videos & lightweight metrics help athenahealth validate concepts earlier in design (Part 1)

By Joanna Engelhardt & Aaron Powers

athenahealth provides network-enabled services for healthcare and point-of-care mobile apps to drive clinical and financial results for its hospital and ambulatory clients

For many designs, the first time customers see a concept is in a usability test of a complete prototype — getting feedback from users earlier in the process can accelerate the pace of iteration, shut down low-value projects earlier, excite and engage disengaged customers, and allow the business to invest in the best and brightest projects in their portfolio. A lightweight product demo paired with carefully selected standardized questions can turn selecting the best projects from gut feelings into science. This article, part 1, explores the why and the benefits we and our customers get from adopting Concept Validation. Part 2 will dive deeper into the science behind it.

Design The Right Thing

“Designing The Right Thing” is a challenging stage of design — while there are many qualitative user research methods such as Contextual Inquiry, quantitative methods are few and far between. Some teams (including athenahealth a few years ago) invest much of their user research in usability testing. This means you may be investing your valuable resources in testing the wrong design; sometimes somewhat crudely referred to as “polishing a turd.” Agile teams have a particular challenge for this: when staffed by designers, some who may be specialized in design rather than user research, they are faced with the double pressure of needing to pick the right design in a few-week sprint so that development teams don’t sit idle. Worse, customers who have emphatically requested the change don’t get to see any movement until the design is mature enough for usability testing, meaning months of potential disengagement from key engaged customers.

Invite more users into the design process with Concept Validation’s little videos

Little videos, usually less than 2 minutes, demonstrate the concept at a high level before it’s developed.

Concept Validation can bring your users into the design process early on with “little videos”. Could this work at athenahealth? The short answer is yes. Not only is it working but it’s changing the dialogue. It’s creating bridges internally between design, product, and engineering as we are able to determine that the proposed solution to an articulated problem is viable and reasonable. It’s improving the relationship between R&D and our client facing teams as they become integral to hosting product communications and we are able to validate product solutions fit. We can do this cheaply and quickly (sometimes in a few days) and it’s easy for our users — it’s watching a YouTube video and making comments. It doesn’t get much more 2019 than that!

This especially helps us reach users such as Physicians who are too busy to schedule time with us to meet & discuss work. These surveys provide simple quantifiable and qualitative results, side by side in one repository. It can provide metrics to help understand whether users will love it or hate it. This can help transform a backlog — no more will you hear the comment, “Did customers look at this?” We now have at least 25 customers validate all solutions that come out before we write any code. Sometimes 3 to 4 times that many.

In the words of Rose Dunphy, “This has been a wonderful experience starting with the concept introduction, socializing with our client, championing their provider review, collating results and debriefing on the outcomes. Our product team was incredibly supportive in how to craft our client introduction and respond to client questions. Our customer was completely engaged from the start. To quote one of their team who has been engaged with enhancement request delays, “Christmas has come twice in 2018”. We have now engaged this client in alpha/beta work in conjunction with their concept responses and our team continues to surface viable opportunities. Personally, one of my the best experiences in my 5 year journey with athena.” Many other customers have said that they love filling out the surveys because they’re so quick & easy.

If you are looking to delight your customers, think more about “little videos” and how they could be the answer. Users validate whether you understood the problem. Users tell you where your solution falls short. Instead of having users ask about the roadmap, or what you are working on or when they will get it, they get insight early in the design process. They are on the journey too.

Continue reading about Concept Validation in Part 2: The science of little videos & lightweight metrics.

If you liked this article, you may also find our related articles in this series valuable on your journey to measuring the user experience: Why your company needs standardized metrics to accelerate development of successful features, Getting questions about the ROI of UX? 3 ways to refocus the conversation to opportunities, Establishing a “Design Quality” metric to build design credibility, and Applying Machine Learning To User Research: 6 Machine Learning Methods To Yield User Experience Insights.