MedGeo Ventures
Delivering Value to Medical Associations with Product Design Best Practices
MedGeo Ventures is a Zillow-like, map-based career exploration platform that’s purpose-built for medical association members. They partner with medical associations to display all potential employment opportunities to qualified members, so that members have a better idea of the total market options and employers receive information only from qualified professionals.
In just one year since its launch, MedGeo has already partnered with five different medical associations and helped thousands of medical professionals.
In an effort to sustain momentum, MedGeo partnered with Crafted to refine their existing platform and begin laying the groundwork for larger and more long-term initiatives as well as introduce design practices into their team structure. Over the course of three months, Crafted was able to…
Formulate quick solutions to start addressing MedGeo’s biggest challenges,
Lay a foundation for larger design tactics and systems that could scale with the company, and
Keep MedGeo at the forefront of the industry with respect to its user experience.
Goals
Update the member-facing map to be more intuitive and better highlight the extended feature values
Improve the employer management user journey to allow for easier onboarding and job posting for employers
Renovate the UI/UX of the ecommerce platform to engage with more employers and increase the number of connections members are able to make through the map
Challenges
Focus
MedGeo is a small, passionate team with a lot of voices. We had to rigorously prioritize to make sure we were meeting expectations across teams and delivering consistent value across those different teams and the personas they serve.
Staying Ahead of the Market
MedGeo has an innovative product at the forefront of the market, but competitors are already starting to mimic their features. We needed to move quickly and deliver continuous value in order to stay ahead.
Research
With a limited product team trying to move fast, MedGeo couldn’t afford to spend time on the wrong thing. We utilized scrappy methodologies and affordable research tools to validate new features, and introduced the team to user research best practices for continual validation in the future.
Approach
Move Fast and Rigorously Prioritize
Speed is a key value of Crafted, and was a primary focus of this engagement from the start. We had a lot we were hoping to accomplish with the MedGeo team across three separate areas of their ecosystem, and only three months to do it.
Right away, we knew we had to narrow our focus. Speed only works if you are being intentional with it; we had to pick a starting point and work step-by-step to ensure we delivered real value, rather than spreading ourselves too thin by biting off too much too fast. By narrowing in on one area of their ecosystem, we were able to gain deeper domain understanding faster and start delivering real value to users iteratively. We received feedback on live features later on as we migrated the focus to additional areas.
The first step here required identifying the different dependencies across users and different areas of the product. We started with running a personas workshop to identify our primary users and separate out any edge cases that could be deprioritized. We emerged with two primary personas: members (job seekers) and employers (job posters). While both personas are highly dependent on each other’s experience, we decided to focus our initial efforts on the member interface. We found more opportunities within the member’s experience that could be implemented quickly. By starting there, we could provide immediate improvements to those users before turning our focus to the larger efforts needed to update the job posting platform. And by bringing more members into the app, we were able to expand the hiring pool for employers and deliver tangential value to them as well.
Establishing clear priorities allowed us to work faster and ensure consistent alignment across Crafted and MedGeo throughout the engagement. The key here was identifying where the most high value+low effort opportunities lay and focusing on that single user experience rather than spreading ourselves thin trying to address problems across all personas simultaneously. It also allowed us to quickly pivot as the project evolved due to changing business goals and user feedback as there were less items in progress at any given time.
Understand Business Needs and Drive Alignment
For each area of MedGeo’s ecosystem, we took the time to understand the product, the industry, and do an in-depth analysis on how the product could be improved to meet business needs utilizing market analysis and opportunity trees. We also shared our efforts across the entire team to validate previously identified challenges, reinforce prioritization, and create a cross-team knowledge base.
By taking the time to understand the product and market before starting any design work, we were able to drive alignment, move quickly, and more easily communicate with the MedGeo team. It also allowed us to understand user impact across different challenges MedGeo had identified, and operate off of a solid foundation to quickly iterate on both near-term and long-term value.
Once product foundation was established, we balanced effort across the top opportunities using a 2x2 prioritization matrix, which involves working from high value+low effort features down through high value+high effort features. As a result, we were able to introduce immediate solutions into the platform and test them with users while we built out implementation plans for more comprehensive efforts.
“The two things that impressed us the most were how well they integrated themselves into the team and how quickly they understood our business, which was hugely impactful.”
Continual Research
Research was introduced at the beginning of this project and user feedback was collected throughout our time with MedGeo. We were able to do several small cycles of user interviews with both key personas across their applications (members and employers). These validated our in-flight efforts as well as exposed new needs and unexplored solutions. By doing research consistently, we were able to quickly build off of our design efforts, create consistent cycles of feedback, deliver consistently good user experiences, and stay ahead of competitors.
One of the biggest challenges of the MedGeo application was the innovative nature. There was a lack of familiar patterns to use when explaining certain features. This informed our largest research effort during our time together: we had to solve for a new naming convention around communicating job status for different locations across MedGeo’s map.
We needed to pick words that would immediately resonate with users and create clear expectations around what to expect from locations under each status. To do this, we sent out a survey through Typeform and were able to hone in on new and improved language that resonated across a large group of users. By not seeking complete consensus we were able to implement phrases that, while not perfectly correct, were at least no longer actively wrong or misleading. In the future, we’ll test the language we implemented to validate that users have enough understanding of it to interact with the platform as we would expect.
All of this research occurred in tandem with design iterations and development. This allowed us to quickly adapt development efforts to include smaller updates, and iterate with more confidence based on the feedback we received.
Outcomes
In just three months, we were able to deliver multiple feature and improvement designs for implementation across the MedGeo ecosystem. We left a backlog of low- to mid-fidelity designs in Figma and research on Miro for them to work with until our next partnership cycle.
We were also able to introduce best practices across both design and research methodologies for the product team to use even after our engagement came to a close.
What the MedGeo Team Had to Say
“The quality of the design is dependent on getting all the inputs and figuring out the business needs to be solved. Crafted did an excellent job with this, not only talking to everyone at MedGeo but also looking at competitors and other similar sites…Everything was well researched, well thought out, [and the] designs were awesome!”
“[Crafted] was in the office with us twice a week, which was wonderful. Meeting in person helped us to sit down and have screens right next to each other to hear different feedback inside the office from various team members, which was invaluable. Additionally, we communicated on Slack and made virtual calls as needed when we weren’t in the office together.”
Conclusion
Our work with MedGeo embodied our Crafted values of value, quality, and speed. We were able to deliver real value in three months and leave the team with the tools and foundation needed to continue moving quickly in the future.
By introducing product design into MedGeo’s process, we opened up more opportunities for user research and validated solutions to existing challenges. Crafted’s design expertise allowed us to move quickly and deliver wide-ranging improvements backed by industry best practices and quality user research. Our close relationship and collaboration with the product team also helped maintain transparency, reinforced design efforts with their deep domain expertise, and allowed for fast feedback cycles and quick turnarounds for immediate value.
We look forward to the continued partnership between MedGeo and Crafted, where we can continue to assist in building an amazing, innovative product for the medical industry.
Whether you work in MedTech or build software for another industry, reach out to learn how Crafted can teach you design best practices to drive value for your users.
