Lumedic

Guiding an exceptional team through the challenges of Covid and beyond.

I was hired into Lumedic as a Sr. Product Designer in December of 2019. I took over managing the small team the same week we all went home for quarantine in March. Once it was all over I managed three UX Researchers and six Designers most of whom I able to hire myself. I learned so much from this team about leadership, product, and healthcare. Most importantly I realized exactly what I wanted out of my career and what sort of roles I do and do not want in the future. Also, it showed me how few tools are provided to middle managers to keep their daily lives in order. So I set out to address this in my next company…

  • One of my guiding books on UX team leadership is Liftoff! by Chris Avore and Russ Unger. In the book they detail a great process for developing your team's Charter. We did a multi-step workshop that eventually led to a living document that we updated quarterly or when new folks joined the team. Our first design looked great but was a bit lifeless. I encouraged the team to make it "ours" and so we brought in doodles and designs from our weekly drawing exercises. I think it is a wonderful encapsulation of what made that team special.

  • Our team developed and maintained a design system within Figma. The primary need was ensuring accessibility while incorporating numerous components that resonated with the tone of healthcare, and IBM's Carbon system fit the bill.

    Since Figma libraries from IBM were not available at that time, we undertook the manual migration process from Sketch. This was a manually intensive process and needed most of the teams help to accomplish while also delivering on our daily work. (IBM would later speak with us about our process when it came time for them to officially create their own official Figma library. They were incredulous that we had manually migrated the system just by reading their public documents and brute forcing it.)

    With the expansion of our project portfolio, it became evident that a designated Design System Librarian was necessary. I recruited a nascent Design Operations Manager for this role, who would later go on to spearheaded the roll out of the Fluent 2.0 Design System at Microsoft.

  • During my time at Lumedic, our flagship product was an experimental system to use blockchain ledger technology to provide verified credentials of your vaccine status. This project was constantly changing, highly technical and served three customers (medical issuer, vaccine holder, and business verifier). I was proud that our team delivered highly technical and useful designs throughout the lifecycle of the product including a MVP that was used by the Seattle Symphony.

    The product involved deeply understanding brand new identity management technology and a high degree of social and behavioural psychology. We as a design team insisted that we take the time to make sure the end user was armed with as much information as possible about how their information was being shared and used.

    Unfortunately by the time the technology was ready and vaccines were rolling out, the topic had become so politicized and the public so weary of the lockdowns that simple paper vaccine cards (or nothing at all) were enough to create confidence to re-enter public spaces.

  • The team was tasked with designing an experimental payments portal around the idea of prepayments for medical procedures. A process that was usually explained to the patient over the phone. The complexity here was high with a scope including healthcare, payment plans, and checkout flows. At first a junior designer was overseen by myself but as the complexity mounted we looked to other patterns. We added a second designer to the team and implemented a true "Pair Design" process. This unlocked a pattern we would use repeatedly on the team. I also advocated for a dedicated UX Research project to dig into the complexity of what was being asked of the end users. The result was many new avenues of options and potential solutions based on real world feedback.

  • Lumedic teamed up with and later bought Alphalytics, an older Insurance Claim Denials Analytics tool. Despite its age, it had a dedicated user group from major hospitals. My experience with analytics software put us in a good position to work together on small improvements to the interface. I brought in a Designer with expertise in internal dashboards and intricate user experience to help find the right balance for suggestions - changes that were beneficial to users without being too complicated for the engineers to reject. Many of our ideas were integrated into the product, which remains in operation as the sole Lumedic offering today.

  • After the Alphalytics acquisition Lumedic looked deeply into redoing a Denials Analytics platform from the ground up. We kicked off an ambitious project with User Research identifying personas and key workflows. Then, working closely with Product Owners we mapped out a new approach to analytics, visual style and application navigation and Information architecture. This work directly lead to Lumedic being included as a primary brand in the merger that became Advata.

  • When I arrived at Lumedic our brand was simple and under developed. I had hired a jack of all trades Visual Designer to split time between product design and marketing teams. Her and I sat on the committee that worked with a series of outside Brand Design agencies. I represented the Product Design concerns of how we were concurrently designing a Design System and needed certain things from the color systems and and our very strict usability standards. While our visual designer was the representative for aesthetic design and keeping translating brand strategy into visual language. I am proud that we landed on such a bold combination of Brand and color space. Not simply choosing the Blues, Greens and white of standard Healthcare. We were able to find something that could be product colors while also being striking and new. Which for a company pushing the edges of ML and Blockchain I feel, was the correct choice.