Introducing the UX team at PointClickCare

“You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.”

Dieter Rams

As the Director of the UX team at PointClickCare, it is my pleasure to bring you the first in a series of blogs that will share stories from our team detailing our journey to world-class. What is world-class? For us, this means having a generative culture and great capabilities to deliver value to our customers. By featuring product design, design thinking practices, customer centricity, and this series will show what it means to be a world-class organization designing for people. Our intent is to have the broader design community and our customers learn about our challenges and successes, and what it is like to design in the healthcare industry.

Design at PointClickCare

PointClickCare has been incredibly successful for many years, we all know that what got us here is not necessarily what will take us to where we want to be in the future. Our business has adapted to react to an ever changing industry and the design of our products need to follow suit.

Our team is dedicated  to championing users’ needs to create useful, usable, and compelling experiences to help them reach their goals. Our team has grown from the early days of three designers to more than twenty UX and content designers across North America working on high-priority projects such as core clinical/financial/analytics, home health , and acute & payer solutions.

A team on a mission

The UX team’s mission is to create compelling UX for strategic solutions and initiatives. We create a design system and guidelines to improve UX consistency and team productivity. We also improve the UX mindset at PointClickCare by training product teams on design principles and best practices.

Delivering an outstanding UX is a critical part of our Big Hairy Arduous Goal (BHAG) goal of becoming a world-class software company. To accomplish our mission, we start with a shift-left integrated UX mindset in the product engineering organization. We build exceptional UX capabilities in content design, design research, UX design, and visual design to deliver customer values.

Design principles

In our day-to-day design work, the UX team applies industry-standard design principles as well as our own three unique design principles.

1. Trusted interaction

We work with healthcare regulatory requirements and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) in our market segment. In doing so,  we earn users’ trust with the PointClickCare signature experience. Users can provide care confidently to the vulnerable population with reliability and safety. We meet user expectations of reliability, regulatory safety, error prevention and recovery, speed, accessibility, and security in every interaction.

2.  Balanced consistency
While we know consistency is one of the many keys to our success, our team is also keenly aware that sometimes there is a need to deviate to what we call balanced consistency. For example, creating a medication order should work the same regardless of where users perform this task in our solutions, and our design system ensures such consistency. However, if we need to deviate from our standard consistency guidelines, our team is agile enough to do so but we always ensure any change is done with intent.

3.  Holistic data and user flows
Caring for our vulnerable population takes a team of caregivers, therefore, we design scalable solutions to enable seamless collaboration in care teams, rather than just as individuals. We build data and user flows in the context of end-to-end scenarios, not in isolation.

The PointClickCare Mission

Designing for PointClickCare is more than just usability, it’s helping people. Our company’s mission is noble and our work has a positive impact on the lives of millions. The UX team takes pride in our craftsmanship and we have fun. The best part is, we learn from each other and improve together.

I encourage all of you to stay tuned and continue to read the forthcoming articles in our UX team blog series.