New Zealand Patient Portal by Felipe do Carmo

My role

As the VP of User Experience, I've led the Design and Front-end Development teams, facilitating workshops, conducting research, overseeing design work, and providing mentorship in the design thinking process.

My background as a computer scientist with project management experience has been crucial in this role. Vensa needed more than just UX skills; they also required project management expertise to drive product strategies forward.

In this project, I planned and executed a variety of qualitative and quantitative research studies, developed strategies, created architecture and prototypes, conducted A/B testing, and produced various UX artifacts. I managed an agile team to ensure we delivered faster iterations with high-quality results.

Furthermore, I actively participated as a VP in business analysis and decision-making alongside the CEO, guiding us in building the right product for the market.

Vensa challenge

01.Think big, go global

Vensa already had a clear vision of how the platform would be. Initially, it was conceived as a single product, leading to years of development that we couldn't afford, given our looming deadline to enter the market within a few months. The challenge with this Patient Portal was to create a robust platform capable of accommodating multiple features. It would be launched with limited functionality but designed to expand progressively as new add-ons were featured over time.

02.How to release fast with the available development resource

n a team with a limited number of developers, the agility of UX deliveries and interactions could be dramatically affected. Therefore, the chunks of deliveries for validation should be as small as possible yet substantial enough to delight our users and meet our primary customer needs for a quick validation of the UX dynamics.

Breaking down the entire project into valuable chunks of MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) was a significant challenge that needed to be approached with careful decision-making to ensure its success.

Design thinking and creative process

Individual commitment with a creative and collaborative team

The strategy and process

The key to the success of this project:

Every developer, BA, support, sales, and CEO was involved in the design thinking process, from research to workshops and design validation.

There was a lot of room for trying different approaches to design process methodologies over the 2-year project.

As the product and the team were becoming more mature, we adapted to the ongoing process and the rapid changes in business needs as we progressed.

We created a flexible methodology culture where we would try different ways of approaching ideas so we could learn from every experience and adapt to the project's needs. This way, we could move with inspiration, excitement, fun, and speed.

The great experience of working with this awesome team is that there was always excitement and open-mindedness to trying new processes as the project's maturity required different approaches.

For instance, the way our extensive research was structured at the beginning wouldn't fit with the fast development of small parts of the system. We could then reuse the lessons from past creative processes and try a faster methodology with that initial knowledge in hand.

01.Discovery and Definition
We started out with workshops involving the staff, user doctors, nurses, health practitioners, and patients to understand what we knew and what we didn't know about what we were building.

As it was a serious project that involved medical information going across multiple platforms, we had to be careful with how we presented the data in a safe way.

After a valuable time dedicated to the first research phase, which involved multiple methods, including interviews and workshops, the team gained more clarity on how the platform would work and how the functionalities would interact with each other.

02.Development, testing, and deliveries
As we released our first application on the platform with a simple design to engage our users, we decided to involve them in our project and validate which valuable features would be developed next.

By using user feedback and fake doors in their experience, we understood where the gold mine of prioritization lay for what should be released next, avoiding the development of weak engagement features.

This way, we would design the right things at the right time while prioritizing the needs of patients and medical centers without losing engagement along the way.

03.A design solution for a big architecture with modular releases
For a large platform architecture with ongoing releases of new features, we decided to adopt a modular design system. With this approach, we could plan and add to the platform seamlessly, without the need to develop a new design for every feature release.

With a modular design approach, we saved on the cost and time of development, enabling us to grow faster and maintain consistency.

Vensa Patient Portal

Project Overview

Vensa challenge

Individual commitment with a creative and collaborative team

It has been a pleasure to be part of this exciting journey that will truly and effectively increase access to health services around the world.