CASE STUDY
The Challenge
EmpoweRx, a member of the Roux Institute’s Future of Healthcare Founder Residency, is working to revolutionize healthcare staffing by empowering clinicians to take charge of their careers through entrepreneurship. The company offers a unique, technology-driven platform that enables clinicians to directly contract with healthcare organizations. The platform streamlines the process and provides necessary tools for compliance, time management, invoicing, and payment processing, ensuring both better pay and flexibility for clinicians while reducing contract labor cost healthcare facilities.
EmpoweRx’s product team required expert UX design support before embarking on platform development. The challenge: create an intuitive interface serving two distinct user types (healthcare job seekers and hiring managers) while simplifying complex information presentation for non-technical users. Without proper design guidance, the platform risked poor adoption and user frustration across both audiences.
The Partnership
To solve this challenge, EmpoweRx partnered with Dr. Mahsan Nourani, an expert in human-centered computing and AI and visual analytics, from the Center for Human-Data Interaction at the Roux Institute. Dr. Nourani worked with the team to lead research and design of a new user-centered interface to support this need.
“We knew what we wanted our interface to achieve, but research gave us the tools to translate ideas into a usable product. It was eye-opening to see how applied research can directly benefit industry. Having that foundation early in development made all the difference.”
– Mary Kathleen (M.K.) Bryan, CEO of EmpoweRx
During discovery phase, Dr. Nourani’s team worked closely with EmpoweRx stakeholders and target customers to define design goals, identify marketplace platform requirements, map use case scenarios, and determine core functionalities needed for platform design and refinements. This process generated design guidelines that informed iterative design of a series of user interface wireframes, including various views, functionalities, and user interactions for navigating core use cases. Dr. Nourani’s team applied best practices from UI/UX, human-computer interaction, and visualization research to effectively present complex information within the static wireframes. The team worked closely with EmpoweRx stakeholders to gather continuous feedback on wireframes, ensuring design alignment with product requirements and business objectives. Once designs reached consensus, Dr. Nourani’s team conducted usability testing with target customers to validate the final designs. Feedback from this study informed final refinements, delivering implementation-ready wireframes.
The Outcome
Dr. Nourani’s delivered user-centered, implementation-ready wireframes, alongside findings from pre- and post-design user studies. A comprehensive report including the wireframes, detailed design specifications, key insights, implementation challenges, and recommendations for integration within their existing website was delivered to EmpoweRx as the final deliverable.
“It was important that we understood customer needs and how the customer would interact with our product before we fully invested in implementing it on our platform. Now, we have a data-backed design, and it will be a true differentiator for us.”
M.K. Bryan
CEO, EmpoweRx