GOAL
Redesign Get Help’s existing intake workflow by understanding Recovery Houses’ current workflows, identifying gaps and improving the overall user experience.
PRODUCT
Find Recovery Housing Now (FRHNKY)
CLIENT
Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center (KIPRC)
PROJECT SUMMARY
After a successful agreement for Get Help and KIPRC to merge products and work together, KIPRC requested for me to be on the project full-time from APAX Software to lead the design for the next grant cycle as we worked to merge the two products. One of the major features I worked on was the intake flow, which is how a Recovery House logs new resident data upon move-in.
FRHNKY GENERAL PROJECT TIMELINE
A little bit of background on the integration with Get Help here: Get Help is a startup out of Los Angeles that was creating management software for homeless shelters. Turns out, a lot of the software needs for homeless shelters and Recovery Houses overlap, and with Get Help’s willingness to work closely with KIPRC to achieve their goals for FRHNKY, a partnership with them made a lot of sense instead of KIPRC and APAX working to build a very similar management software from scratch.
A big part of my responsibilities for this phase of the project were to integrate into the Get Help and KIPRC team to offer product and design direction, as well as continue to work closely with Tyler from KIPRC to do further research and evaluation on the current workflows of Recovery Houses for various purposes, and align Get Help’s UX to be more intuitive and in tune with our user’s needs. One of those main purposes was for the intake workflow.
Before I dove into that one feature, I needed to have a better understanding of Get Help’s software as a whole. This would help me to promote consistency in any design changes and also understand what could be affected by certain changes in the workflow, both in the backend and the UI. I then started this grant cycle by becoming intimately familiar with the product, and created a workflow chart visualization below to help with that. Tyler and I used the chart as a reference point throughout the project. It also highlighted how much (unnecessary) overlap there was in the software. For example, more than five different paths led to viewing a few slightly different client details screens, which we found was unnecessary and was highlighted by this visualization. Here is a small sample of the chart:
Eventually, I was able to zero in on the intake flow specifically. I was received example paperwork from five Recovery Houses that showed what data they collected on a new resident and when. I compared all of the houses’ forms, and Get Help’s digital forms as well, and created a document with each fields listed out, categorized, and color coded to know which house(s) they came from. This helped us easily go through what fields we wanted to add, change and in what order they should go.
Tyler and I had in-depth conversations with one owner of a few Recovery Houses in particular to get some more perspective, and eventually felt that we were informed enough to suggest the changes to the fields. We were lucky to have strong relationships with so many Recovery House owners for questions and research like this. I then went forward to suggest improvements to the UX flows in areas such as navigating to the page to start the intake process, making each section work and flow together (things were too compartmentalized and separated in the UI in Get Help’s software), ordering the sections based on our sample houses’ workflows and more. Get Help had an external designer come in and create the UI and form field patterns before I integrated with them full-time, so I used those patterns to create some quick and dirty screens to guide the developers through the states and changes and wrapped that work up right before my departure from APAX at the end of April.
