I used Balsamiq’s simple but powerful Mockups tool to build a series of screens demonstrating the capabilities of our Rx Response Simulator. You can see my short five-minute presentation here.
The intent of this exercise was twofold. First, I used it as a vehicle to gather feedback and gain buy-in from our clients. The screens you see there incorporate the thoughts and ideas of six very thorough reviews by our client. Mockups are a brilliant way to spur meaningful dialog on new products and services. They get across intent and meaning a far superior way to a wordy requirements document. Spending the time up front like this on iterative review cycles is time very well spent. It’s far easier to incorporate ideas at this stage vs. doing it late in the development cycle.
Second, we use the completed Mockup to get our UX vision into the hands of the development team. Developers are artists. So, by no means am I attempting to curtail that artistry by forcing an exact look and structure with Mockups. Its meant to get the intent of the vision across. There’s plenty of room left for artistry and, of course, plenty of work required for a good developer to breathe life into that vision. In fact, each time we go through this exercise I’m blown away by just far our great development team can take these ‘push starts.’ My Mockup is the fuzzy caterpillar. Their end products are the beautiful butterflies. Still, it’s a pretty fair caterpillar.
A little context about what the Rx Response Simulator does...
Traditionally, our company had focused on financial payment switches, i.e., transaction processing. Over the past few years, we’ve adapted those strengths to create similar products and services for the Pharmacy (Rx) adjudication marketplace. Same basic ideas and goals, but – at a very high level – ISO8583 messages get replaced by NCPDP messages. You can read a bit more about that project in a previous post.
“Adjudication” is a fancy word for an activity that all consumers know very well: when you walk into a pharmacy and present your health plan benefits card, the transaction(s) conducted to validate you, your plan, your coverage vis-à-vis the prescription you’re looking to get filled...that’s adjudication. For further insight, check out my 15-Touch Customer Interaction process flow. Adjudication (and a preliminary step called ‘Local Edit’) are tucked into the Steps 1 and 2 slots there (roll your cursor over “Notes and Narrative” to get more information).
Rx transaction acquirers (e.g., pharmacies, hospitals) use adjudication gateways like Relay Health and Emdeon to connect to the Pharmacy Benefit Management (‘PBM’) players like Argus, Bioscrip Caremark, Express Scripts and Medimpact. Transactions are formatted as NCPDP 5.1 and D.0 formats.
But suppose someone wants to try out some new NCPDP mandates before the gateways are ready? Or wants to replay some responses that aren’t being handled properly in a production environment? Or wants to test some front-end conditions that can only be triggered by specific NCPCP responses?
That’s where our Rx Response Simulator comes in. It allows our customers to take on any of those needs. Responses can be hand-crafted field-by-field, or – more powerfully – built directly from full responses captured from a live environment (and pasted into the simulator).
With that as background, the Mockup should make sense.
Recent Comments