IDENTITY
Overview
A secure digital platform enabling Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (CCHMC) and Hamilton County Jobs & Family Services (HCJFS) to share critical medical and legal information about foster children—replacing slow, paper-based exchanges and improving timeliness and accuracy of care.
Role
Graduate Research Fellow – Led user research, co-creation workshops, information-architecture design, and iterative prototyping within the Live Well Collaborative team.
Company
Live Well Collaborative in partnership with CCHMC and HCJFS
Timeline
May – August 2017
Goal
Design and launch an online portal to streamline the exchange of foster-care health and legal data, ensuring that social workers, clinicians, and administrators can access up-to-date information to support the health and well-being of foster children.
Research Highligths
Fragmented Processes: Critical data was exchanged via mail and long paper workflows, creating delays and inconsistencies.
Diverse Stakeholders: Medical professionals, social workers, and IT staff had different priorities, technical skills, and security concerns.
Complex Data Needs: Sensitive legal and medical information required rigorous privacy safeguards and clear access permissions.
Discovery
Current system
Employing participatory methods, we mapped out the current system along with the CCHMC and HCSJFS team.
Goal System
Based on shared analysis, the goal system was mapped for us to use it as a guide along the research and design process.
Co-Creation Activities
In order to understand the needs of both group of users:
HCJFS (social workers and administrative personnel, IT department)
CCHMC (medical doctors, nurses, social workers, researchers, IT department)
The first interactions focused on learning about their daily activities, schedules, tools they used at work, environments they work at, people/departments they interact with, and the kind of data they most need to access to.
Identify
Who are we designing for?
Initial user research helped us identified the user profiles displayed below.
Content and Information Hierarchy
18 participants from HCJFS and CCHMC who represented our personas partook in a card sort activity. Participants were asked to arrange and prioritize the content for the website.
Design
The insights gathered from various research activities (card sorting, observational research and interviews) along with secondary research, helped us design the structure of the portal.
Wireframing and Testing
Medium fidelity wireframes were initially created to get feedback from users. We relied on paper wire-framing and held in-person sessions to go over features and workflows.
Usability Testing
After refining the wireframes and developing a high-fidelity version, we conducted cognitive walkthroughs with users from both organizations. The interactive prototype was tested with 15 users from both organizations.
Final Prototype
Based on the data drawn from user testing, the prototype was refined to ensure users’ mental models matched the system, hence, to provide a great user experience. The portal was launched in 2018 as a pilot project in Hamilton County. As of 2020, it has been expanded across the state of Ohio. Future plans include to expand nationwide.