Lantum is a workforce management platform for healthcare. It helps schedule and manage clinical staff, and helps clinicians find work. I joined Lantum just as they raised Series B, which was used to move into the Secondary Market. Previously we’d operated solely in Primary Care.
I lead most aspects of design at Lantum, but this post is specifically about our approach to research. Since leaving to go on sabbatical in May, I’ve had time to reflect on what made research such a crucial part of what we did.
What research?
When I talk about research, I’m specifcally referring to design research or user research. Particularly qualatative studies with prospective or existing users.
The nature of what we’re trying to do with Lantum means we’re constantly covering new ground. The jobs of both a doctor and rota manager respectively are highly specialised. They have an existing set of tasks in a particular way that, although at times inefficent, has very specific requirements that have to be met. Literal lives are at stake.
This meant our initial research was very tasked focused. In my experience, most research starts this way. It’s important work and we did a lot of it at Lantum. From mapping out the entire rotation lifecycle of a hospital department to shadowing rota managers during their day-to-day duties.
A different approach
What was more interesting thought, was when we started to look futher into the ether. We started to ask them about themeselves, how they felt about their colleagues and how they related to their jobs. What was fascinating was this added so much context that was missed by just looking at the mechanical aspect of their jobs. By connecting the dots with all this additonal context, we built an entire story of each member of the department.
Ellie Morris and Jasmin Hamid, the researchers who worked at Lantum, taught me how important this context building is. All this supplimentary information turns out not to be that supplimentary – it’s actually where unique insights lie. Having this empathy, in the true meaning of the word, helps you think like the people you’re designing for. You understand their lives through the stories you’ve built around them.
Crafting stories
For us, research is all about crafting stories. You remember stories. You feel stories. You change your actions based on stories. You don’t change you actions looking at graphs, listening to statistics. These things are incredibly important but they must form a story not be delivered on their own.
These stories might be simplified or just give the TL;DR but that’s what most people need. If our goal for research is to improve our understanding and improve our evidence-based decision making across the company - what good is that if only a select few see and understand that evidence? No good at all. It’s better we globally raise the understanding, even if a little, than have a handful of experts isolated in one department. This way, the researchers job isn’t just a querying machine - cooking up insights on request for stakeholders but a storyteller. Someone who spreads the gospel of ‘our users’ to others and let’s take them on how they will.
Harder evidence and evaluation is appropriate and very important but only at the time of request. It does no good to collect huge amounts of “good data” only for it to sit on a doc somewhere and not be used. In fact it’s actually negative because of the opportunity cost of finding, analysing, and documenting that data.
To be continued…