work
about
Epic
My Role
I work at Epic Systems on the MyChart team, where I design features and tools for patient omnichannel communications in healthcare such as Telehealth, MyChart Messaging, and MyChart Questionnaires. I also design UX patterns for artificial intelligence.
Tenure
January 2023 to Present
COntext
Overview
The current MyChart Questionnaires framework was made in 2018. Since then, many healthcare organizations have complained that it is clunky, outdated, and does not meet current industry expectations for questionnaire interfaces, which has resulted in many dissatisfied customers and clinicians. My project was to design a future “north star” vision for MyChart questionnaires that could serve as a guiding structure for user interface enhancements.
Stakeholders
Epic’s company structure is quite unique. Software developers are usually the owners of projects, not only acting as the developer but also as the project manager. I continuously worked with team developers and leads overseeing questionnaire development in MyChart, as well as communicated decisions and received feedback from executive MyChart leadership.
Problem
MyChart Questionnaires has historically been a neglected area of MyChart, but more recently has gotten a spike in complaints from healthcare organizations regarding its functionality and feel. These problems are related to patients and customers not happy with the look of the user interface, questionnaires not providing enough transparency and feeling redundant, and customers losing patient engagement through lack of completion, which is due to poor retention and UI busy-ness.
Research
Having been recently added to the Questionnaires team at the time, my first step was to understand the root of these issues and come to a team consensus on the design approach. I held a half day design sprint with major team stakeholders to discuss the state of Questionnaires UI. We sorted through customer complaints and issues, summarized patient pain points, pinpointed areas of the UI that were lacking, explored 3rd party examples and developed areas of focus for tackling these issues. 
Project Scope
In summary, patients need a questionnaires interface that is engaging, transparent, and efficient because organizations need to collect a lot of information and both patients and clinicians should not need unnecessary barriers to collect or input that information.
Project Goals
Questionnaires should be engaging to fill out
It should be transparent where the data is going
A questionnaire should look and feel like a modern questionnaire interface
Reduce the amount of clicks it takes to fill out a questionnaire
See and feel a positive and immediate difference in completing questionnaires
Single Select
Design
Wave 1 - Updates to Standard Components and Navigation
The questionnaires re-design was tackled in waves. For the first wave, I re-designed our most basic question components for MyChart mobile, which were single and multi-select answer choice buttons.

*Note: The designs depicted are recreations and do not represent the actual UI of MyChart for NDA purposes.
Single Select
I explored what single select buttons looked like today in modern questionnaires and designed MyChart questionnaire single select buttons to look more modern. Many medical questionnaires are long and complicated. In my final design, I considered how I could increase readability and accessibility.
For readability, I aligned answer choice text to the left and stacked answers into a single column so that answers could be read top to bottom. I found that when answer choices were center-aligned, it was difficult for users to anchor their eyes while looking through answer choices. For accessibility, I widened the buttons to reach the ends of the screen, which allowed users to answer with either hand.
Multi-Select
Design
There was one glaring issue with multi-select buttons in MyChart: they looked the exact same as single select buttons. Using the same design principles in my single-select approach, I thought of ways to design multi-select to feel more modern yet distinct from single select.
I added checkboxes to distinguish these buttons as something a user can select multiple of. Multi-select buttons also ran into an issue where an odd number of answer choices made the last choice in a list take the whole width of the screen, making it seem like it had more visual priority. With my single column approach to answer choices, I was able to give each answer choices a more equal visual weight.
Navigation
Design
Along with modernizing the button stylings, the navigation needed to be simplified. The current navigation is crowded and redundant, which often confused users when to click which navigation option. In my final design, I simplified it to help users focus on the question, rather than the overwhelming amount of navigation choices.
I simplified navigation to just two choices, back and continue. Green in MyChart is also indicative of submission or completion, which wasn’t the case for continuing to the next question. I changed continue buttons to be blue to make it a navigation pattern. The finish later and cancel buttons felt cluttered at the bottom, and users are often confused how they are different. I decided to remove them from the navigation because they can be accessed through other means that made more sense for users, such as exiting the questionnaire or navigating to a previous page.
Future Waves
Future waves to improve the usability of MyChart Questionnaires and meet our project goals are still underway and being designed. While I can’t share much detail right now, some themes we’re exploring are:

- Auto-advancing questionnaires
- One question per page
- Introduction and goodbye pages to promote engagement and transparency
- Re-designing the review page
- Personalization
Outcomes
Standard components
These button stylings are also used in other MyChart activities. I collaborated with other MyChart product teams to create standard components that can look good and match other MyChart workflows. These buttons stylings have been applied to areas such as scheduling, forms, and clinicals.
Takeaways
Meeting User Expectations
Navigating and researching the questionnaire industry was a key exercise to making this successful, as there is an established user expectation for filling out questionnaires. Getting many stakeholders and patient opinion on our redesign was critical to solve the challenge of balancing medical questionnaire expectations and consumer questionnaire expectations.
Accessibility
Accessibility plays a huge role in healthcare software. This was my first time thinking critically about how different user groups might use our software. I worked closely with accessibility experts to make sure that the interface I designed met visual standards and usability standards. In the end, I was able to deliver designs that was functional and could be applied throughout all of MyChart.
Other work
Check out some of the other work I have been a part of below!
Telehealth — Epic Video Client
Epic-based telehealth platform keeps patients coming back to WellSpan Health
Epic Spectacles — Apple Vision Pro
Apple Vision Pro unlocks new opportunities for health app developers
Mentor Labs
Pttv
Build TT
Don't Panic!
XpRessions