End in Mind: Best Buy, Health Partners and Allina Wellness Program Integration
Intro:
End In Mind is an organization which offers Community Wellness programming around storytelling, conversation, and action to help people live with more intention and purpose. Discovered and leveraged customer insights to prototype a digital platform that hosted program content and serve as a community portal for employees of Best Buy, Health Partners and Allina.
The Users:
Primary Users:
Employees at all levels:
Employees will be using the platform to access caregiver support as well as resources for wellness, mindfulness, and living with purpose. These may include readings, podcasts, and links to external resources/organizations for specific needs.
Internal End In Mind Champion:
The Champion wants to facilitate a company culture change toward employee wellness and support for caregivers. They will be using the platform to access resources for coordinating End In Mind activities within the organization. They need to connect business unit leaders to Train the Trainer resources when needed. The Champion may also need access to analytics, such as data around usage and results. They may need to see types of content/resources that are available in order to help Executive leaders make End In Mind resource purchasing decisions.
Secondary Users:
End In Mind programming creators and owners programming creators want a platform to deliver high quality programming for employees, and resources for Champions. They need to be able to populate the platform with content for dissemination to subscribing employers. They will also want access to analytics on usage, and potentially a conduit for feedback from subscribers to understand how their content is being used and received.
Tertiary Users:
Managers and Business Unit Leaders want to support employee wellness, particularly for employees who are caregivers. They want to increase team member retention and effectiveness, and decrease turnover due to personal/medical factors or burnout. They will use the platform to access resources for facilitating conversations around wellness on an ongoing basis with their teams. They may also access Train the Trainer resources if they are interested in becoming certified in a specific service, such as Legacy Letter or Living Will writing.
Business Objectives
So far, End in minds programming includes live events, multimedia resources, and training for community members to become leaders within this framework. They are presently developing a comparable program for local employers, to support employee wellness and mindfulness, and particularly to support employees who are caregivers in end of life situations.
End in mind hopes that a digital platform can help elevate the organization to include people that aren’t able to attend live events or have conversations in person, thus also helping the non-profit scale across companies.
The Process
Our Design team took to action conducting deep dive research into other wellness programs, put out a survey to see what users would be interested in participating with in a wellness platforms as well as conducting interviews with stakeholders from Allina and Healthpartners.
We synthesized notes during this process to see common patterns that started to emerge. After seeing what the user goals were and the business goals, we started to formulate a plan on how to accomplish building out a digital platform.
Low Fidelity Prototype
As the mantra of UX goes, we went into this project trying to fail fast, thus we created a low fidelity prototype to see what features users wanted and what they did not want. We tried designing around quotes users said such as:
I think employees are reluctant to talk or ask about wellness issues because of the taboo attached to mental health. You don’t want your employer and your coworkers to think you are “crazy”.
This gave us insight on what features to include such as a “anonymous” function, so they are able to speak freely without retribution from a manager or co-worker.
Usability Testing
After making many iterations in our low fidelity prototype, we started to make a higher fidelity wireframes to test with participants. We conducted 5 tests, recorded their voice and infliction as well as guided them through a questionnaire to test our hypothesis on how best to proceed. Although the tests were mostly successful, we received feedback that we took into consideration into our next tests. These user quotes were invaluable
So, I’m not exactly sure this wellness portal is suppose to do. Is it for people who are dying?
Hearing this quote, we knew that we needed to give a better explanation on the splash page to change our copy to better reflect what it was End in Mind was trying to be.
The Aha! Moment
Our design team came to the conclusion that the core value of end in mind was sharing stories. Therefore we decided to put together a fidelity wireframe to see if that translated to a online forum which users would be able to share their stories with other people throughout their company. We started out offering to let users submit writings, audio, video and pictures.
What we found doing usability testing is that users overall didn’t appreciate the different mediums.
“How is this any different from facebook or reddit?”- Participant 4
After eliminating the different choices, it gave a much different outlook on how users participated with the forum. Because it was only text based they seemed to connect with it more, as .a way to feel connected to the community as large. We also added more resources and context as to how this is a safe place. That way they knew they were able to talk freely, knowing their thoughts and stories would be received without negativity or toxic behavior other places have.
What We Prototyped
After numerous usability tests as well as a survey, our team developed a fully functional wireframe including a shared story page, resources and a home page which curates based on users on-boarding.
Click here to download the annotated wireframes
The Deliverables
Our final handoff meeting we included the following:
• Read me- To walk our client through what we were delivering
• Annotated wireframes for developers to utilize as well as the staff at End in Mind
• Raw data including survey results
• Key insights form the research we conducted
• Presentation of our findings
Going Forward
End in Mind was excited by the prototype we created, and started asking how they would go about making our wireframes a reality. We guided them to a software development group, and gave the suggestion of talking with Bestbuy to leverage their business relationship as to make this platform functional and help people live a little more thoughtfully.