CVS Health Virtual Care
Overview
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My role was to lead 11 design team members of various disciplines (UX, UI, accessibility, content, and research) in designing two new virtual care services by CVS Health
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I planned, scoped, and managed the workload and process of the design team
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I supported design team members through professional development, gave design feedback, set up brainstorms, and collaborated with product leadership to align on the delivery of work
Skills
Product Design Strategy, Workload Management & Planning, Persuasion, Mentoring, Professional Development, Delegation of Work, Team Process Improvement, Fostering Positive Team Culture
Time Frame
January - December 2022
Role
Experience Design Manger: Planning design work for 11 design team members of various disciplines while giving design feedback and professional development, while collaborating with product and engineering on the planning and delivery of work
Outcome
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1,026,000 virtual care visits in 2023 after delivering designs and launching CVS Virtual Care and CVS Virtual Primary Care
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95% conversion rate (from when the patient starts scheduling to having their virtual care visit) due to usability testing and quick team brainstorms based on user feedback/data
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I ensured designs were delivered on an aggressive timeline through my planning and collaboration with Product
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By actively reviewing the career goals of designers each month, I was able to assign work based on interests, which boosted team morale and helped us move faster
Problems
During the pandemic, CVS Health received feedback that their existing virtual care services were difficult to use with many technical bugs.
Our team was tasked with creating a landing page and registration experience for two new services:
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On-demand care (general medical care) and mental health care – replacing our existing services
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Virtual primary care – a new opportunity that offers patients a primary care doctor who is completely virtual
Problems to solve for:
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Help patients understand what the offered services are
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Create an easy registration experience to schedule a visit
Setting the team up for success
Workload planning, scoping, and management
Each quarter, I would meet with Product leadership to understand the features that needed to be designed for. I'd collaborate with them to make sure the selected features made sense for the user experience.
With the list of features, I worked with my design team members to map out all of the tasks that would need to get completed to fully design the feature (ie. user interviews, wireframing, usability testing, content draft, accessibility design review, etc.).
Throughout the quarter, I would run weekly sprint grooming where we would adjust our plans as needed for each person's tasks in their swimlane (pictured below).
Virtual workboard structure
Our team worked in Miro, but they noted it was getting difficult to keep track of what the latest design was, or what needed their attention.
I held a retrospective to understand more about what was working, what wasn't working, and any other ideas they had.
Based on the retrospective, I worked with Steph Amaral on my team to create a new structure for people to work with. We gave each discipline (UX, UI, accessibility, content, and research) their own space, with clear markers on what was in progress and what wasn't.
I continued to gather feedback on this structure after a month to improve it more. We added a "to-do" list to each space and stacked the spaces vertically because it was easier for designers to keep iterating their designs horizontally.
Helping the team design the virtual care experiences
User research
We worked with our researchers to gather existing research at CVS and any resources online to understand what fears and concerns patients had with virtual care.
Patients were...
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Concerned about security of their health information and where they could access the data
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Curious about price and if their insurance covered the costs
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Skeptical that their health concerns could be solved virtually
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Wondering if their virtual care provider was fully certified in medical practice
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Excited about the potential time saved from virtual care
Throughout our design process, we addressed these concerns by adjusting the content of our pages through usability testing.
User flow
I created a high-level user flow to illustrate how potential patients would sign up for the service (including for caretakers of children).
User journey blueprint
To get everyone to understand the greater details of how the provider and system would work with the patient, we created a user journey blueprint together and noted any questions we had. This helped everyone on the team understand the end-to-end flow, for all parties involved (ie. patient, virtual care provider, the back-end systems, and caregivers).
Design iteration, feedback, and brainstorms
Each team member was dedicated to a certain set of screens within the flow.
Every week, I hosted two design feedback sessions (an hour each) to review everyone's work. This allowed for me to give high-level feedback and allow other team members to give specific feedback. We took turns presenting work in progress, and as needed I would give direction or support.
I also hosted a design brainstorm session where we would review one problem a designer was stuck on to generate ideas on how to move forward.
Pictured below is an example of our team reviewing an error scenario and adjusting the content to make sure it was clear. We first reviewed it in a feedback session, but the designer was still stuck, so I set up a board during our brainstorm session for everyone to come up with ideas on how to solve it.
Everyone shared their ideas on how to solve for the error scenario, and we came to a consensus to help the designer move forward.
We iterated and reviewed with our Product stakeholders once a sprint. Whenever we disagreed on an interaction, we would go back to user research or set up a usability test to learn more. Pictured below is an example of some low-fi screens we were ready to test for, and the flow was coming together.
Usability testing
As mentioned before, we tested early and often. We tested participant understanding of the services, what they would do at each step in the process, and what confused them. We did several rounds of testing throughout the year.
Pictured below is a screenshot of our usability testing notes. I helped the team set up a board to clearly take notes on different parts of the design. This helped the team synthesize the feedback much more efficiently.
Landing page:
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We initially proposed multiple landing pages for the services, but found that it was technically easier to have one page
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We did extensive user testing on the language and worked with legal/clinical teams to make it clear what the services were
Selecting a patient page:
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We initially didn't design the page and content to scale if someone had multiple dependents, so we made sure the components fit all the language needed
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We brainstormed multiple interactions for adding a dependent, including if their date of birth was out of range
Patient information page:
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We worked closely with the backend teams that send and store data to ensure we were collecting the right information
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We learned through testing that patients wondered why we were asking for their mailing address and gender, so we added clarifying helper text
Notifications:
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We reused as much as we could from other CVS services, and learned this made designing and developing multiple notifications (confirmations, reminders, cancellation notices) much easier
High-fidelity design and development handoff
Based on testing results, we updated the designs and I worked with the Product and development teams to coordinate the format of handoff. For timing of the handoffs, that work was delegated to two designers on the team, Stephanie Nguyen and Tayef Farrar, as I started overseeing other projects.
Supporting the team beyond the virtual care project
Professional development
I had 3 direct reports of the 11 team members (the others reported to their respective discipline manager). For those direct reports, I met with them once a month to discuss their career goals:
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What part of the design process do you want more practice in?
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What communication skills or soft skills would you like to work on?
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What are you most passionate about in design, and how can I help you get better?
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Where do you want to be in 1 year? 5 years?
I would brainstorm one on one using these prompts, and then help each designer come up with tasks that they could do throughout the quarter that would help them meet their goals.
Any task that was completed in our next check-in would move to the "Achievements" frame, where it became easy to see all of the work they'd done throughout the year.
(Image shows my professional development format, but purposely blurry to keep the information private).
Kudos and praise
Each sprint, I made sure that we each took time to celebrate our wins. I created a frame in our Miro board where people could drop anonymous kudos throughout the sprint, and then close to the end of the sprint we would come together to write some kudos at the same time.
This helped boost team morale and keep the team going during some of the tougher weeks.
Product and development discussions
I was the voice of the team during leadership meetings while they continued to design.
I often created timelines showing when work would be delivered, especially if there were business requirement changes that we had to adapt to. This helped everyone get on the same page, and negotiate as needed for the deliverables.
We successfully launched both virtual care products
We made a fantastic team — supporting each designer through the work was rewarding every day. We launched CVS Health Virtual Care and CVS Health Virtual Primary Care — ultimately giving patients more options for healthcare.
If you're interested in design work I've done myself (outside of leadership) at CVS, take a look at the smoking cessation project.
