Item Attribute Consolidation - A Grouping Problem
Every item – medication & supplies, within Omnicell’s medication management system was characterized by a staggering 147 distinct attributes or more, dictating the behavior and rules applicable to the item at a particular location. To ensure ease of finding and editing an attribute that impacts an items behavior, we needed better grouping, labeling and architecture of these attributes.
At this point, I got an opportunity to grow the team and we then tackled the daunting task of reviewing 147 item attributes for each item. The item attributes were organized in non-intuitive categories, causing users to struggle with findability when looking to edit a single item attribute.
I decided to invest into ethnographic research for the team, to get a comprehensive understanding of the daily tasks performed by pharmacists. The team shadowed pharmacy staff, techs and nurses to better understand all the tasks they needed to complete. They came back and provided an entire map of daily, weekly and standard tasks. We then refined the item attributes grouping based on a nuanced understanding of pharmacy tasks. I spent several days working with the SMEs, reviewing item attributes, categorizing them based on the tasks they were related to, eliminating attributes that were not used and combining those that were related. I then worked with content team on terminology & labels to make it more recognizable.
The end result was a better grouping of attributes by tasks, so users can find an attribute easily and reduction of attributes from 147 to 78.