UX/UI Research & Design

Background

Praxent provides resources for a healthcare administration startup to monitor and In six months, Praxent successfully delivered quality core themes that the client would latch on to. Also, they helped align the teams towards a shared vision and assisted them in the process. They led a constant framework and communicated effectively. Overall, they stood out for their expertise.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a 35-year-old software company with roots in the financial technology space. We’ve grown over the years through a combination of acquisitions and organic growth efforts. I’ve been working here for over four years, three and a half focusing on financial technology solutions, and I’ve recently moved into our healthcare technology solutions. My current work involves efficiency, health claims, and adjudication.

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Opportunity / Challenge

What challenges were you trying to address with Praxent?

We acquired technology specifically for pharmacy claims adjudication and had several customers already. We had a mature solution in the market. Still, in July, we announced a new initiative with an existing client and a partner to fully modernize some of this technology for pharmacy benefits management (PBM). It was the next generation of what we already had in the market.

Since the technology had been around for some time, it was only being maintained. We didn’t have a new product development team in place nor the design capability necessary for that level of redesign. Additionally, we were coming from another modernization effort and didn’t have the in-house talent we needed, so I advocated for an outside consultant to augment our talent.

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Solution

What was the scope of their involvement?

We built a team with Praxent to leverage production. Initially, we brought them into the fold and tried to identify a scope of work that made sense. They offered a broader spectrum of services, but we didn’t need them. We had a plan and technical staff to deal with the rotation side, so we hired Praxent to focus on qualitative and quantitative upfront pressure research with internal and external customers. Also, we wanted to emphasize thinking outside our constraints for more holistic experiences that would be driven by a workflow and understanding perspective rather than a functional interface.

What is the team composition?

Some of the firm’s partners were involved in the early meetings. Once we were established, we got a core team with a product manager that attended all meetings and gave us updates. Then, we had a primary researcher and designers in the background.

How did you come to work with Praxent?

Another colleague in the team was aware of them. We needed to move fast, and Praxent’s work was particular to the area of enterprise healthcare. We were impressed by their presentations.

What is the status of this engagement?

The first scope of work lasted six months, from August 2021–February 2022. I hoped to keep them engaged seamlessly, but we had a couple of months of lags, unfortunately. Now, we’re in a three-month engagement.

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Results & Feedback

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We agreed on a specific scope for a large project, and even that limited scope was really ambitious. However, Praxent was able to frame up well what they would do for the stakeholders who weren’t accustomed to working with a design firm. Their ability to get people on board in various roles was helpful. Also, they structured some of the early research protocols and helped with interviews, getting quality information, and synthesizing that back to stakeholders in an organized way.

All in all, they came in and made sense of a lot of data flying around and came up with some core themes that we could latch on to. Then, they quickly followed our direction requests to cover a certain breadth of ideas and go deep in a couple of areas and some of the early wireframe prototypes, which helped get the teams aligned towards a shared vision.

How did Praxent perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was positive. We had weekly updates with the project manager, and they presented a common and constant framework, which was helpful for the people involved. Also, they were good at communicating if things were slipping. When they did, it was more on areas outside our control, such as scheduling and trying to get user interviews with people that were hard to reach.

We had a couple of areas where we had to tweak the scope a bit and consider the slight budget change. However, Praxent handled those communications well and with enough lead time so it wouldn’t disrupt the work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their general talent in UX research and design was their evident strength. Also, their understanding of the obscure industry was a significant advantage for this particular initiative. They were organized and transparent in their structure, and the team delivered high-quality artifacts that met people’s expectations and kept everything moving.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any strong criticism. The critical things were usually on our side.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be clear about why you’re engaging them, where their work stops, and where your internal capability needs to take over — getting that upfront allowed us to make a lot of progress once we were engaged. Also, it was helpful that they were willing to invest the time to get the statement work right.