The project goal was to design a way to deliver McKesson's best healthcare software products quickly via the cloud as well as make it possible for third parties to leverage McKesson's software and APIs to create their own products. The solution, called the Intelligence Hub was to do this by building an efficient, scalable, and automated cloud based infrastructure. This SaaS platform supported development, product management, product catalog, education, and account components, and performance analytics
The output was a wireframe prototype and text based documents using a highly iterative approach.
As the head of design (as a consultant working for the D4 Agency in Philadelphia) for this project I began by analyzing the competitive landscape, market trends, business goals, and customer needs in order to better identify the product requirements. I also identified current state workflows for developers, product managers, and leadership.
Requirements were developed iteratively rather than by writing full requirements up front. There were too many unknowns in the workflows to design them any other way that starting each build with a small set of requirements. Seeing these rendered by me in the prototype generated a better understanding of what this product was and also created new questions. In turn this drove us to define the requirements further. It also created an energized cross discipline team as a by-product.
Development of the Requirements through the design of information architecture and page level functionality
Developer's Dashboard. The tool separated developers from product managers at sign in. There was a huge number of iterations by me and the product manager on this page. Work here pushed the definition of requirements further than any other page did. Colors were not coming from a visual design strategy. Instead they helped us define segments of the Requirements Doc.
I developed all information architecture and screen level design in an Axure prototype. Here we see the API management page.
The prototype showed the full product manager workflow. And of course the full product manager workflow was shaped by the work we did on the design.
The API management page in the prototype allowed the client to explore dashboards, add APIs, do versioning, build a team, select add-ons, and more. Color here is in advance of actual visual design. I was just keeping the look compatible with some screens that had been designed.
Results
We achieved the definition of a massively innovative product that went on to fundamentally shift how McKesson planned software deployment for their customers.