UX RESEARCH / WEB DESIGN / USER TESTING

Designing a Workflow to Merge Duplicate Accounts

The American Nurses Associate (ANA) approached my team in February 2022 to help them create a digital solution for resolving duplicate accounts in their system. I worked on the project as the sole UX/UI designer.

Timeframe: 3 weeks

Role: UX/UI Designer / User testing facilitator

Client team: ANA Customer Support Team and other stakeholders

The Problem

ANA had a backlog of an estimated 30,000 potential duplicate member accounts in their system. Many nurses only log in to update their certifications once a year, and some of them create new accounts for every update.

ANA used a manual process for merging duplicates into a primary account, but this required significant time and resources from their Customer Care team. With limited resources and an ever-growing backlog, this process was no longer viable for ANA, and they needed a more strategic means to handle this issue.

The Solution

I designed a workflow that would allow users identify their duplicate accounts at registration and login. This workflow would then walk the user through the steps to claim their duplicate accounts, consolidate their credits & certifications into a primary account, and finally submit a request to remove the duplicate accounts via batch processing.

Discovery Work

I conducted a Zoom workshop with ANA stakeholders and the Customer Care team to fully understand the problem space. The client provided documentation ahead of the kickoff meeting to explain the process, so I was able to map this into a concept flow and provide some initial ideas on what the screens may look like:

KICKOFF

The team provided some excellent feedback on their current manual process, as well as some notable critiques / pain points they’ve encountered in the past:

“Getting in contact with members to verify their information and process mergers can take weeks or even months sometimes. Everyone’s just so busy.”
“Many nurses don’t remember the email address they used, so they create a new account. But then they can’t access their old certifications or credits. It takes weeks to resolve.”
“There’s no easy way to claim an old account. You either have to call us or email us. There should be a way to automated some of the process before it reaches us.”
“Nurses have to update their certifications by the end of the year, and we always get slammed with requests in December. The last week of every year is so stressful.”

OBJECTIVES & CONSTRAINTS

I worked with the ANA team to identify some project objectives for the new process:

  • Must be intuitive and easy to move through

  • Must allow for “un-merge” if the wrong accounts are merged

  • Must work with existing integrations to pull user information

  • Must ensure no loss in user information

There were also a few design constraints identified from the start:

  • Must only use elements from their current design system (no frontend UI enhancements, as the team wanted to launch as soon as possible)

  • Must match the look and feel of existing site pages (since this was a brand new workflow that didn’t have a precedent, the team expressed in the kickoff meeting that a unique or “fresher” look and feel to this workflow was not the goal)

VALIDATION CRITERIA

Our conversations about validation criteria also uncovered a few other items to consider:

  • The option to save progress was important to include (in the event a user has multiple duplicate accounts to validate, this may take more than one session).

  • If a user sees the duplicate account’s partial information and realizes they selected the wrong account, they must be able to skip the account (if more than one duplicate account was chosen) or opt out completely (if only one duplicate account was selected).

ADDITIONAL INSIGHTS

From here, I worked with the ANA team to refine the workflow steps further, including the criteria for identifying and validating duplicate accounts:

  • At login and at registration, the system would match the following information against the user’s account information:

    • First name

    • Last name

    • State of residence

  • If users select a duplicate account to merge, they must validate the following information from the account (account information will be partially shown)

    • Email address

    • Phone number

    • State of residence

Design

INITIAL DESIGNS

Once the workflow was reviewed and approved by the ANA team, I moved on to design. I walked through other ANA pages and workflows to document the design components available to them, as well as to familiarize myself with the overall look and feel of their pages.

Since this project required me to only use existing design elements, I worked in high-fidelity design to create the pages needed.

REFINEMENT

I prepared a demonstration of the process for the ANA team to review, and they provided some additional feedback:

  • The team decided to hide the main navigation on this workflow’s pages to help guide users from start to finish. The team was concerned that users may unintentionally exit the workflow by clicking a menu option, so this was a strategic means to keep them focused (clicking the ANA logo in the top left would still allow them to exit the workflow, and this would also trigger the pop-up modal to save their progress).

  • They also decided to allow users to validate duplicate accounts via login (in case users didn’t have their login credentials at the time of making a new account but could access that information later).

Final Product

THE RESULTS

The prototype was delivered to ANA’s development team in March 2022 following user testing to validate that the prototype fit the needs of users, and it was launched in August 2022. We circled back in February 2023 for a six-month follow-up discussion and discovered that:

  • New account registrations were down 30% from previous years (most new accounts belonged to newly certified nurses in 2022)

  • The account merge process had reduced the backlog by 40%, from 30k duplicate accounts to 18k remaining

  • The Customer Care team were able to enjoy their December holidays (woohoo!)

Retrospective

Following the project, I compiled some thoughts around what could have gone better:

  • Investing in UI enhancements: Defining the workflow pages using only existing assets was an interesting challenge, but it still requires the user to walk through several pages to merge their accounts. Simplifying content through functionality enhancements (for example, reloading a single frame with the steps instead of reloading the entire page) is a tried-and-true strategy for walkthrough models.

  • More coordination with development: ANA’s development team wasn’t really involved in the design phase of this project, which can sometimes be a recipe for disaster if an outside designer isn’t able to gauge the technical viability of a design. I remained in contact with their development team from March to August 2022 to support as needed, and thankfully no major issues or concerns arose. Having their input during the design demo stage would have been added assurance that we weren’t making any design assumptions that wouldn’t be doable in development.