uCern

Introduction

uCern, a website where Oracle Cerner’s clients and associates can easily communicate about Oracle Cerner’s products and services, has been an often-used resource for over a decade. 

When Oracle Cerner learned that the platform hosting the site was being sunset at the end of 2020, it used this as an opportunity to redesign uCern. In this redesign, the focus would be on making the site more personalized for each associate and client - this included quickly and easily showing information such as conversations, documentation, and notifications about products a person used.

To ensure that the redesigned site was easy to use and met all of its users’ needs, the uCern team brought on Oracle Cerner’s Shared Services Engineering (SSE) UX team, consisting of me and one other UX designer, Rebecca, to assist.

User Research

Rebecca and I first spoke with the team to find out as much as possible about this project, including the main user groups, the team’s and users’ goals, pain points with the current site, and required functionality. 

Next, we worked with the team to think through the workflows for major areas of the site. One of these workflows was the onboarding process - this process needed to be quick and easy while still getting enough information from users to personalize the site for them. With this in mind, we worked through how we could do this within the constraints of the new hosting platform.

Conceptual Design

To discover what other sites were doing with their onboarding processes, presentation, and content offerings, I completed a competitive analysis. The information I discovered informed much of our future design and workflow decisions.

We then worked with the team to completely redesign the current navigation structure. After the team spoke with various associates, clients, and groups around Oracle Cerner, we used this information to think through how to make the navigation easy to understand and use.

Using all of the information we’d learned so far, Rebecca and I worked with the team to create wireframes for the main pages of the site.

To keep the site consistent and easy to learn and use, we created templates for much of the site. As we created each wireframe, we frequently returned to the requirements and user data to ensure that what we were creating was meeting users’ needs.

Design Requirements

Using Oracle Cerner’s current brand theming guidelines, Rebecca and I created a style guide tailored specifically for the hosting platform. This included the correct formatting for global styles and information on elements that could easily be updated in the platform (such as button states).

Using the approved wireframes, I conducted multiple working sessions with the team to create high-fidelity mockups. In the mockups, I included annotations describing everything from which global styles to use to how many columns an element should span.

Testing

Before the updated site was moved into production, we tested many of the main tasks and flows with several clients and associates across Oracle Cerner. These tests helped us realize what was and wasn’t working with the site - for example, we learned that many users found the updated “Create a Document” buttons helpful and easy to see, and that some of the navigation options were not as easy to understand or find as we initially thought.

Since the site was moved to production in mid-2021, we have continued updating to the site (updates we could not make initially due to time constraints, and updates based on further client and associate feedback). Using client feedback, analytics, and additional usability testing, we will continue working with the uCern team to ensure that the site is always as usable and useful as possible.

What Did I Learn?