5 min read

VVWH

Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital. Redesigning Access: Empowering Staff with the Right Information, Right When It’s Needed

UX / UI
Capstone Project

My Role

UX Designer, UX Researcher

Tools

SharePoint

Google Forms

Project Detail

Senior Capstone Project

Full School Year

Problem

Clerical staff couldn't find what they needed, fast enough to matter.

Von Voigtlander Women's Hospital's clerical staff depend on a SharePoint intranet to manage urgent situations, locate consent forms, and coordinate patient care. The existing site forced multi step navigation, surfaced outdated links, and lacked any personalization. I redesigned it from the ground up around real task based workflow.. directly in SharePoint!

So Why Does This Matter?

Project Goals

Reduce Cognitive Overload

Improve Navigation Clarity

Surface High Priority Content

Client

University of Michigan Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital, a nationally ranked maternity and women’s health center.

The hospital currently serves over 133,000 women a year and is committed to delivering exceptional patient care.

Research

Research was guided by three core questions designed to align with project objectives:

  • What situations prompt users to use the SharePoint site during their daily work?

  • How does the current SharePoint system support or disrupt task flows?

  • What are the three main issues that create confusion, stress, or inefficiency in workflows?

By using a mixed methods approach, I was able to understand how clerical staff actually use the site, where friction is, and what improvements would have the highest impact on patient care quality.

Survey

14 responses out of 36~ clerical staff

  • Mapped common tasks, pain points, and goals across the team.

Research Insights

Five consistent problems made SharePoint hard to use.

I synthesized from affinity diagramming and a user journey map, tracking a single task across 6 steps.

Requirements

Contextual Interviews

5 in person sessions, ~30 min each

  • Staff demonstrated live task walkthroughs while thinking aloud

Clean, safety-focused interface that builds trust while enabling convenient food sharing.

Heuristic Evaluation

Applied Nielsen Norman's 10 heuristics to a representative task across all site pages.

System vs User Needs

"It's very informational and it's just hard to find in a fast manner." Content existed. Access didn't.

Future Development

Card Sorting

1 session, 25~ min

  • Revealed how staff mentally organize content (by task not document type)

Expanding reach and improving user experience.

  • Map integration for visual location discovery

  • Enhanced safety features including background verification options

  • Expanded dietary filtering and allergen management tools

Navigation & Findability

Multi level navigation menus with no recents to backtrack to. Even experienced staff got lost. "I couldn't find it for anything."

Inconsistent Information Architecture

Staff think in task flows (Admitting, Birth Documentation). However, the site was organized by document type, forcing clerical staff to guess where everything was.

Steep Learning Curve

There were no VVWH specific training resources. New hires navigated by trial and error.

Lack of User Control

There were no back buttons, broken links, dead ends. Most pages were outdated and staff reported not even using the home page widgets. Staff are also "stuck" which is critical during emergencies.

Average time to find downtime information during a busy shift was 4 minutes.