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
TIMELINE
Jan - April 2025 (Ongoing)
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
TOOLS
Qualtrics
MS Office
Figma
Tl;DR
PROBLEM AND CONTEXT
CLIENT PROMPT
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.
Emory's UX COE will be an online resource for the Emory network to engage with our team, learn UX best practices, house training & learning assets, and connect the UX community through communication and promotion of events.
What is "UX CoE"?
A UX CoE (Center of Excellence) 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
SECONDARY RESEARCH
2-1. BACKGROUND RESEARCH
Our initial step involved conducting a background research to identify the role and function of a CoE in various organization and assess pros and cons of different CoE models to inform the design of the Emory UX CoE.
2-2. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Research Objectives
• Identify existing CoE websites
• Examine different learning formats, types of resources, and community-building strategies
• Assess gaps in Healthcare UX CoEs
Methods
• Collected diverse UX COEs across academia, tech, and healthcare
• Compared offerings, service models, and engagement strategies
• Examined various ways to learn and engage with UX in healthcare
Why?
• Avoid redundant primary research
• Inform the creation of a healthcare-specific UX CoE
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: FINDINGS
Lack of existing UX CoEs & UX Communities in healthcare
There are no dedicated UX CoEs within the healthcare sector.
Moreover, while general UX communities exist, there are only a few dedicated spaces for UX professionals in healthcare.
Current CoEs offer various learning formats and knowledge sharing style
Existing UX CoEs offer a range of learning formats (e.g., serlf-paced modules, instructor led sessions)
Most UX CoEs also provide general UX resources and have an option to request more tailored consultation
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: IMPLICATIONS
Opportunity to lead
Emory UX CoE can define its own structure and best practices. Our solution also has a potential to establish spaces for UX collaboration and knowledge-sharing
Flexible Learning Formats + Balancing Support
Our solution sholud accomodate divserse learning preferences, and combine on-demand resources with personalized consultation
PRIMARY RESEARCH
3-1. BRAINSTORMING WITH EMORY UX
Research Objectives
• What are stakeholders’ goals and expectations for the UX CoE?
• Within the 3 key use cases, what are the UX Team's needs?
• What do stakeholders anticipate each user groups will need?
Methods
• Brainstorming session with 4 Emory UX Team members
• Spring boarding activity centered around 3 key use cases and 3 target user groups
• Feature and functionality brainstorming
• Discussion and voting on favorite ideas between each round
Why?
• The UX team’s involvement is crucial (both stakeholders & users)
• Gain insights into strategic direction and practical needs.
• Combining individual and group brainstorming captured diverse ideas and revealed priorities.
BRAINSTORMING WITH EMORY UX: FINDINGS
After the session, we identified all feature and functionality opportunities
To name a few, some of the commonly discussed features were streamlining service requests, providing resources and best practices about UX, empower teams with assets to enable them to do UX work independetly.
BRAINSTORMING WITH EMORY UX: IMPLICATIONS
Based on the votes and post-brainstorm discussion, we prioritized the features into..
Must have
Should have
Could have (nice ideas, but won't affect the success of the CoE)
3-2. CARD SORTING
Research Objectives
To understand the mental models and associations of key concepts that may be included in the Emory UX CoE.
Methods
Open card sort with 8 MS-HCI students
Solo card sort into custom categories
Show and Tell discussion on each other’s sorting methods
Why?
People with UX backgrounds can give relevant perspectives on website organization.
To explore how users naturally categorize information.
It's a good starting point for Information Architecture
CARD SORTING: FINDINGS
We've uncovered some discussion themes…
UX in General vs. UX in Healthcare
Resources vs. self-service assets and tools
Service request form- standalone, within info for requesting services, or both?
Make the structure easy and include clear engagement points- what the user can do and what is relevant to them
Info for documentation vs. Info for sharing
CARD SORTING: IMPLICATIONS
We analyzed all participants' boards and noted down consistent groupings of features and the labels.
The emergence of 7 common themes with consistent grouping suggests that overall, these themes align with participants' natural mental models.
Emphasizing healthcare-specific UX content may better align with user interests and needs.
Clarify the distinction between general UX and "UX at Emory" to address uncertainty.
3-3. SURVEY
Research Objectives
Identify key characteristics that distinguish target user groups
Uncover existing gaps in users’ understanding and knowledge of UX and the Emory UX Team
Gauge users’ interest in learning about and applying UX
Understand how users prefer to engage with UX knowledge
Methods
Qualtrics survey with 8 main questions
Distributed links to Emory Healthcare Digital colleagues via email
Why?
Allows data collection from a large number of target users across different roles and departments.
Captures measurable insights on UX familiarity, prior engagement, service needs, and learning preferences.
Serve as a screening for follow-up interviews
Next STEP: SURVEY + INTERVIEW
This is an ongoing project. Please come back to see the progress!
In the meantime, feel free to explore my other projects!