My role
Research lead, working within a product team made of researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers on a contractor for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Activities
- Research recruiting
- Discussion guide preparation
- Pilot study
- Semi-structured interviews
- Remote, moderated card sorting
- Research analysis
The policy and mechanics behind the Quality Payment Program are complicated, and users often have detailed questions on it. We helped reduce user burden and support volume by allowing users to more easily answer their own questions. Our research work paved the way for enhancements to the Resource Library – a comprehensive repository of program documentation.
A research colleague and I did remote interviews to learn about users’ context of use and card sorting to understand how users would naturally organize the material.
Some of our main insights:
- The importance of “last updated” dates to help people find recently updated resources. People scanned through the list of resources proactively to see what has changed since their last visit.
- People tended to organize resources by performance year, performance category, and reporting track.
- People often referred to a few key documents such as the fact sheets (which provide a beginner’s overview to the program) and the final rule (which drives the CMS policy).
We worked with a cross-functional product team who designed and built the New Resource Library, incorporating our insights. We included the “updated” date on every resource and allowed people to sort the list alphabetically or by date updated. We provided filters corresponding to the ways in which people organized resources in card sorting. And the “General Resources” and “Regulatory Resources” at the top of the list offered easy access to these central documents.
