UX Center of Excellence
Spring 2025 | Industry Sponsored Project
Designing Emory Healthcare's UX Center-of-Excellence (UX COE) as a foundation for promoting and enabling UX in healthcare
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
🔎 Background Research, Competitive Analysis
💬 Interviews, Survey, Card Sorting, Workshop
🧪 Research Synthesis, User Testing
PROJECT CONTEXT
Sponsored Class Project
Time: Jan 2025 - April 2025
Department: Emory Healthcare Digital
Team: UX Researcher (2), UX Designer (1)
TOOLS USED
Figma
Figjam
Qualtrics
Notion
Tl;DR OVERVIEW
What did I do?
I led end-to-end research efforts to inform the design of a UX Center of Excellence (UX CoE), using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Why was it done?
The Emory UX Team aims to establish a UX COE to promote and enable user-centered practices in healthcare. The initiative is intended to reduce the UX team’s workload while increasing stakeholder buy-in.
Any impact?
Our prototype achieved a high task success rate, strong NPS score, and positive qualitative feedback. The Emory UX Team is now developing the website based on our design, with a projected launch in Fall 2025.
What did I learn?
I gained experience in researching information architecture and learned the importance of maintaining consistent stakeholder involvement throughout the design process.
PROBLEM AND CONTEXT
The Emory Digital User Experience team collaborated with Georgia Tech MS-Human Computer Interaction program to stand up a UX Center-of-Excellence (UX COE) as a foundation for promoting & enabling UX in healthcare.
What is a UX CoE? 💡
A UX CoE promotes UX best practices, fosters a shared understanding of UX principles, and provides teams across an organization with resources and expertise.
Through initial stakeholder initiation,
we identified the 3 use-cases
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Goal: Explore types of UX CoEs and identify best practices.
First, we conducted background research to identify the role and function of a CoE in various organization to inform the design of the Emory UX CoE.
Next, we conducted a comparative analysis of existing CoEs across academia, technology, and healthcare. Guided by our "How Might We" statements, we examined various learning formats, resource types, and community-building strategies. Through this analysis, we aimed to identify patterns, gaps, and inspiration to shape a CoE model that fits Emory’s unique needs.
INITIAL STAKEHOLDER BRAINSTORMING
Goal: Understand what the Emory UX Team needs and prioritizes.
As we moved forward, we prioritized close collaboration with the Emory UX team, who are both our stakeholders and primary users. To gather insights into their strategic direction and practical needs, we held a brainstorming workshop.
The workshop included a springboard activity featuring 3 key use cases and 3 target user groups. Participants were invited to individually generate “I wish…” and “How might we…” statements, followed by group discussions and a voting session.
Figjam Workshop Board
After the session, we identified all feature and functionality opportunities. Based on the votes and post-brainstorm discussion, we prioritized the features into “Must Have, Should Have, and Could Have”
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Goal: Capture diverse user perspectives to ensure the UX CoE supports a wide range of needs and experience levels.
Our primary research included card sorting, surveys, interviews, and concept testing sessions. This mixed-methods approach allowed us to: 1) identify and distinguish different user groups 2) explore how their natural mental model works 3) understand their priorities and pain points.
RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
Goal: Effectively synthesize all findings and present them in a digestible manner
To translate our key takeaways into actionable opportunities, we brainstormed Jobs-to-be-Done based on our primary research. We noticed that there are varying levels of engagement needs from learning about UX, requesting a service, and applying UX themselves. We aimed to support each unique type of user and their flow through using the UX CoE.
Key Jobs-to-be-done
Within our primary research, we also identified 3 key characters who may be using our UX CoE website. They each correspond to our 3 key JTBD.
3 Personas
Finally, To define design requirements, we looked to the intersection of user and stakeholder needs. These user needs were identified from our survey, semi-structured interviews, and concept tests. Stakeholder priorities were defined through our weekly meetings and structured sessions with the team.
Based on our research insights, we developed a initial UX-CoE (Check it out below!)
Access Full Prototype
USER TESTING
Goal: Ensure our solution meets the user and stakeholder needs
As we evaluate our prototype, we wanted to quantitatively benchmark the ease of use, satisfaction, and likelihood of using and recommending the UX CoE. We paired the benchmarking with qualitative discussion to uncover any usability issues and user pain points/preferences.
We conducted 30-minute moderated usability tests, in which users (n =4) and stakeholders (n = 4) complete 3 tasks and freely explore the prototype
LESSONS LEARNED
Throughout this semester-long, industry-sponsored project, I gained firsthand experience working in the healthcare digital sector. I also had the opportunity to try research methods I wasn’t previously comfortable with, such as card sorting. This project helped me grow into a more confident mixed-methods researcher, using a wide range of approaches.
If you’d like to learn more about this project, feel free to reach out!
THANKS FOR STOPPING BY 🩷
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