LAWRENCE RAILEY
UI/UX Designer & Developer
Vertice
As the largest and most important enterprise application at Healthesystems, Vertice is a beast! It is the single most complex application I have designed. When I began at Healthesystems, Vertice had a very outdated UI from the early 2000s, and was in desperate need of updating. But the task was monumental.
Workers’ Comp insurance and healthcare is incredibly complex and fraught with various legal and regulatory hurdles. Designing and developing the UI for an app of this level took years. What you see below is only the barest sample of an application that has hundreds of screens, modals, and complex functionality.
UI changes occurred in two primary phases, an interim 2.5 release, and a 3.0 release. Each release increased usage of the application, by approximately 5% and 3%, respectively. Though these numbers may sound modest at first glance, when most company revenue comes from the application, the changes were very positive!
Vertice Logo
Vertice was in need of new branding and a new logo when I was brought on board at Healthesystems. This was the first step in rebuilding the UI.
Vertice Dashboard
This screen helps customers and claims adjusters get a quick summary of claim volume, what claims they might need to work on, sorted by date but also sortable by color coded risk level, and search for a claim quickly.
User Help
Given that Workers’ Comp claims are often so complex that actions may not always be immediately intuitive, no matter how clean and managed the user experience is, I added inline help. At any time, a user can open the help panel and see screenshots, videos, text descriptions, and even highlight specific fields in the UI where they might be having trouble. This approach is similar to TurboTax’s tax advice bar.
By inverting the help color scheme, it creates a visual separation between what is help, and what is live content.
Pharmacy Search
Tying in to the Google API, and comparing that to an internal database of in-network pharmacies, the Pharmacy Search helps claims adjusters recommend pharmacies for prescription pickup.
Live Chat
A feature currently in development is a simple live chat module, to get help and advice from account managers and customer service represenatives.
Narrating Complexity
One of the user experience innovations in Vertice is the “narrative” approach. Certain complex actions just don’t make sense if they are just fields in a form. By creating a sentence structure “you are being asked to authorize X numbers of trips in Y date range for Z locations”, we found that users were more readily able to understand what they were doing.
User research pointed us in this direction. It’s one of the most well-liked features of the new UI.
Walking Users Through Complexity
Another approach used in some complex screens is to use a wizard to walk the user through the various actions needed to complete a complicated task. Work is broken up into tabs and sections.
This is Only a Sample
Vertice is an application that combines functions one might see in Expedia, in a healthcare management application, and a claims adjuster platform. It is exceptionally complex, and the effort to redesign and rebuild its UI was a project of over 4 years, and is still ongoing in some respects. These sample screens show only the barest hint. If I were to compare its complexity to anything, it would be Turbo Tax. Except that in this case, it’s primarily a b2b application.
Contact Information
Just the basics in case you need to get in touch.
6312 Heirloom Place
Apollo Beach, FL 33572
813.433.8197