Improving the surgery scheduling process

Addressing weak points in the platform to improve the user experience of scheduling surgeries.

Roles

UX Designer, User Researcher

Tools / Methodologies

Figma, Internal Research

Timeline

June 2023 - August 2023

CaseCTRL is a software scheduling company. Unsurprisingly, scheduling a surgery is complex. Involving facilities, equipment vendors, medical personnel, administrative staff, and many other entities leads to difficulty in scheduling surgeries.

The platform streamlines the process so that scheduling surgery is simplified with the help of usable software. However, the natural complexity of the scheduling process led to issues in the UI.

I prototyped 3 major problem areas during my internship. By applying digital design principles and human-computer interaction fundamentals, I was able to address the issues while creating a solution that was consistent with the UI of the rest of the platform.

Overview

Representative Selection for Equipment

When the user enters Case Preference into the platform, they select the equipment needed for the surgery.

Under the Vendor section (boxed in blue in the image), the user would choose:

  • Vendor: a company supplying surgery Equipment

  • Division: a subcategory of Equipment that the Vendor provides

  • Representative: an employee of the company who provides the Equipment during the surgery

  • Equipment: surgical parts needed for the operation

The surgeon may have a rapport built with a specific Representative from a Vendor. In that case, they may want to work with a specific Representative during the surgery. However, there is no way to change this with the Current UI.

The Problem

The problem? The surgeon wouldn’t be able to request a different Representative from the same Vendor/Division with this UI.

The Solution

A drop down menu next to each piece of equipment allows an easy way to change the Representative.

Selecting Equipment for a Surgery

When a surgeon is inputting the equipment for surgery, the drop-down menu would be a nested system as seen in the image. First, they select the Vendor, then the Division, then the specific Equipment.

However, if there was Equipment that the surgeon needed that wasn’t already listed, then the surgeon would have to go to the back end of the system to add the Equipment name under that Vendor and Division, then come back to this screen to select it.

This just isn’t a great solution when the surgeon is scheduling a surgery and is on limited time with limited patience.

The Problem

The problem? The surgeon would have to complete a time-consuming and tedious process on the back-end of the platform to add new Equipment if it isn’t already listed in the drop-down menu.

Firstly, listing all Vendors removes the need for time-crunched surgeons to type in the name of the Vendor. There are only a handful of Vendors, so no need to type them up when they could all easily fit into the view of the surgeon.

Next, the surgeon can now add a new piece of equipment directly in the drop-down menu. This would link to the back-end and update the database so that in the future, new equipment is always correctly listed under the correct Vendor and Division.

Finally, the same Representative changing drop-down menu design is applied to this new UI.

The Solution

Representative Reps for Equipment

Many pieces of equipment are needed for a single surgery. Even with the current UI and all of its improvements, there were still two core issues:

  1. Usually, only one Representative is needed per Vendor. With the current UI, the user must tediously change it for each Equipment under the Vendor.

  2. With many pieces of Equipment, the page becomes congested and hard to read.

The Problem

The problem? How can we organize the Equipment needed for surgery in an easy-to-read way, while also eliminating the need to change the Representative for each piece of Equipment under a Vendor?

The Solution

Using Gestalt principles of grouping, this new layout was created.

  1. Vendors are now headings, which form groups on the page. This grouping allows users to process what Equipment is under which Vendor at a glance without having to read as much text.

  2. There is only one drop-down menu per Vendor to change the Representative. This reduces the number of tedious clicks needed to make this easy change.

  3. It’s lighter on the eyes. There’s more negative space and overall the satisfaction of using this UI is higher than the original UI.