A nursing app for easy shift booking and management
Overview
NSW Business Chamber have a network of nursing recruitment agencies that provide agency nurses to public and private hospitals across Australia.
When hospitals can't fill shifts with their own staff, they rely on agency nurses to fill empty spots. Much of this is time sensitive and nurses need be able to view, assess and accept shifts within minutes.
The process for filling a shift, beginning with a nurse setting their availability to accepting and attending a shift and filling out a timesheet to be paid, was all done through phone calls, email, fax and paper. The business wanted to develop a mobile app to support and streamline operations across its various nursing agencies.
My contribution
Journey mapping User research Concept testing Product Design
The team
Year
2017 - 2019
Process
The business problem
The business had experienced a steady decline in shifts being filled across each of their agencies, one of their major assumptions was that nurses were moving to other agencies because they provided a better experience.
The user
We identified two key personas that made up the majority of the user base for each agency and labelled them as either engaged or disengaged nurses. Engaged nurses were defined as users who have a higher level of loyalty to the agency and worked between three to five shifts a week, whereas disengaged nurses, were those who had no loyalty and worked across multiple agencies, while also working three to five shifts a week.
Through our discovery and customer interviews, we uncovered that agency nurses have a 'tough skin' mentality and a general feeling of “it is what it is". They got into agency work knowing what to expect. The biggest pain points that nurses were experiencing throughout their journey was a lack of information when no work was available, as well as parking, shift cancellations and difficulty around submitting their timesheets and getting paid. These insights helped to guide our designs and ensure that our solution would meet the nurses minimum requirements.
The Process
We had five weeks to deliver a new solution to present back to the business. To begin, we unpacked and analysed existing customer data and personas and created problem and solution hypothesises to test with nurses, as well as sending out a survey to gather quantitive data to support our qualitative research. We mapped out the end to end journey, making sure to include every touch point - hospital, agency and nurses - to understand what parts could be streamlined and where our solution could plug into this process. We spent time unpacking the existing journey and designed a low-fidelity prototype, which we then tested with nurses alongside our hypotheses. We made iterations based off our findings and designed a high fidelity prototype to present back to the business alongside the key insights uncovered during the project.
Outcome
Our results showed that 93% of nurses desired this digital solution and would stay with the agency longer due to this new service offering. We presented our findings and recommendations to the wider business, suggesting they start with the build and release of an MVP including the key activities needed to support their nurses across just one of their agencies. This would also allow the app to be trialled with a smaller group to further understand user behaviour before releasing it to the other agencies. Subsequently, we proposed that they roll out features that the nurses had stated they wanted but were not a priority in order to book shifts and get paid.What we uncovered helped the business understand just how archaic their existing process was and this has encouraged them to further research and explore a way of working across each of its nursing agencies to identify a seamless singular approach.