Bighand Legal and Medical Transcription Software: A Case Study
The Medical and Legal professions take advantage of the recorded voice to enable the rapid transcription of legal notes, additions to medical records and other types of documentation. At your consultation, those notes your doctor is taking in that little grey machine on the desk that looks like an 80s microcassette recorder make their way to Medical and Legal secretaries and other support staff to ensure the resultant processes from your consultation are carried out correctly.
We were fortunate enough to be seconded to work with an agency in London over the course of 3 months working on updating and improving the desktop version of a dictation software application—Bighand—one of the Medical and Legal industry forerunners in terms of license seats across the globe.
Bighand describes itself as “a range of speech, task delegation, document creation and workflow tools that help busy people achieve more in less time and organisations become more efficient and effective.” Bighand work with 280,000 people across 2,550 organisations.
Along with agency colleagues, we worked on:
- Creating Personas from workshop output
- Mapping the existing features and brainstorming the feature revision for the recorder against competitor offerings—working on the recorder and player, document queues, specialist functionality like splitting recordings and how administrative staff can effectively manage the volume of transcriptions through an enhanced dashboard
- Interviewing internal stakeholders and moderating external Morae tests off-site
- Designing a journey for how to incorporate forms for other business streams such as managing travel booking
- Producing an interaction design specification to accompany a prototype to guide the developers
Our focus was on the Enterprise Legal platform. However, the only divergence between the legal and medical versions of the software is the custom workflow needed by medical institutions, rather than any UI or UX differences to the presentation layer of the recorder that we were looking at. The parent agency ran a number of user tests using Techsmith’s Morae™ both in-lab and onsite in legal departments utilising a mobile lab and included both end-users and stakeholders. We either interviewed or observed as part of the research.
One of the most challenging parts of the work was balancing/understanding the existing processes the transcription data passes through and guarding the user’s corner to ensure that users’ journeys were aligned with their actual daily usage. A key discovery from this project is that there is always a way to simplify. Different users rely on some features more than others, and a key part of discovery is identifying those features and ensuring that they are clearly prioritised to the user without hiding the secondary features. Whilst in the past we have undertaken projects where a great deal of the user input has been transferred from the internal stakeholders, this was certainly one case where without carrying out the research there would be no credible way of establishing what was worth refining as part of the product.
Summary
Overall, the project was somewhat reminiscent of the Hertz and Remedi Healthcare projects inasmuch as planned to stretch over the appropriate time and with sufficient research activities. From requirements gathering to intermediary user testing of both the existing system and the prototyping, the agency carried out along the way it ensured continuously gathered insights that made a real impact. This was certainly a project where you could have the confidence that the application will be used by a significant number of users to help them and their organisations achieve their daily tasks and business goals with increased success.