CDC & STC Health

The Approach

Working closely with a research colleague and STC’s product owner, I conducted research to learn from the people who use VOMS everyday. By observing and talking to users, we discovered insights about how they do their jobs and identified root causes of the issues they were having.

Field visits with Vaccine Coordinators
To understand how Vaccine Coordinators use VOMS in the context of their daily work, we visited pediatric clinics and observed the process for ordering vaccines, receiving shipments, and maintaining inventory of vaccine doses. Our goals were to understand Vaccine Coordinators’ tasks, the challenges they faced, and the workarounds they employed.

Remote contextual interviews with State Administrators
By interviewing Administrators at State Departments of Health, we learned they are expert users of the system who interact with VOMS for hours a day as part of their jobs. They know the software inside and out, so we asked them to teach us how to do their job. As they shared their screens and walked us through their main tasks, we identified usability issues and unmet user needs.

Discovery Insights
Following the field visits and interviews, we used what we’d learned to define user personas, mental models, and task analyses. These insights provided a framework for understanding the users and aligning on the problems we needed to solve before moving into design.

Prototyping & Usability Testing

I led a collaborative effort to utilize the research insights and design potential solutions that could be quickly tested using interactive prototypes. We began by conducting a benchmark test of the existing software and a prototype the CDC had commissioned. Based on the results of the first usability test, we continued to make iterative design changes and conduct formative tests, quickly learning which design solutions solved users’ problems.

When stakeholders were confident we’d arrived at a solution that achieved the organizational goals and met the needs of users, STC’s designers and engineers used our research findings and prototypes to implement improvements to the software. 

The Result

In the end, our work enabled STC to shorten its expected development timeline for VOMS and deploy software updates with the highest level of confidence they’d ever had. Medical providers and state administrators across the U.S. are now using the new-and-improved VOMS.  

• A consistent and intuitive experience     
• Efficient workflows that match users’ mental models and expectations     
• Reduced the number of user errors     
• Increased user confidence and reduced support calls

STC and the CDC were grateful we included their teams in the UX research process: planning, conducting, analyzing, and generating actionable insights. Their teams now have an appreciation for the importance of doing UX research and are better able to balance complex user and organizational needs. 

Read my interview with STC’s product owner about this project.

“Sixth Man Marketing was an excellent partner for us. Their willingness to learn the use cases, go out into the field to interview end users, perform usability testing and collaborate on workflow design moved our product a long way ahead when it comes to user experience.”

Matt Halloran
VOMS Product Owner, Scientific Technologies Corporation