One of the primary missions of the Mobile Community of Excellence (MCoE) team is to provide guidance, consultation and certification of all native mobile apps developed for DaVita's various end users, whether nephrologists, nurses, patients or employees.

Overview & problem to be solved

Prior to the formation of the MCoE team, there was no general "governance" or established best practices around native mobile apps that were being designed and developed by various groups within DaVita and its subsidiaries. DaVita's business partners were also in the very early stages of understanding mobile apps and their nuances as opposed to the more general understanding of websites. Because of this need, the concept of an MCoE team was established and, after first bringing on an iOS Lead, an Android Lead and a Certification Lead, I was the fourth member of the team brought on as UI/UX Lead.

Much of the first year after the MCoE first started to form was dedicated to authoring and publishing best practices and guidelines for designing and developing native mobile apps. We eventually established seven distinct "gates" upon which a mobile app would be reviewed and certified for release:

1. Brand
2. Security
3. Legal
4. Operations Support
5. UI/UX
6. Architectural Services
7. Code
8. Quality
9. Distribution Model

How we did it

It was important that we make these guidelines easily accessible by anyone within DaVita, including vendors that might be brought on to help with mobile app projects. Because there would be many different authors working on these guidelines, we wanted to have some semblance of consistency with the ability to easily review & update these guidelines every 6 months.

We decided to write the guidelines using Markdown and hosted the guidelines, along with embedded resources such as images and documents, on Github. One of the web developers on our team converted the Markdown documents to HTML/CSS and published to an internally-hosted website for easy consumption.

UI/UX Guidelines

Based on my experience designing mobile apps up to this point, along with a lot of additional research, I published the following guidelines (additional authors are noted if applicable)*:

• Introduction to User Experience (external vendor assisted with this article)
• The Mobile Design Process
• Setting Up Design Files
• User Research (latest version was authored by the UX Research Lead)
• Personas
• UI/UX Checklist
• Glossary of UX Terms

*Note: These guidelines were last updated in 2017-2018 before I left DaVita, as noted at the end of each article. However, they were current at the time and reviewed/updated every 6 months. Every effort has been made to ensure embedded links are still in working order.

The result

Simply publishing guidelines is just the first part of the story. In addition to using these guidelines as a foundation, the most important activities were in the form of constant conversations with various partners along with proactively sharing information to help with general education around mobile app creation.

Co-leading a brown bag talk on the purpose of the MCoE team and introducing general concepts around the potential impact of mobile apps.

Being a brand new team to DaVita whose purpose involved oversight of other teams working on mobile apps, we made a point to begin conversations with lots of listening; we wanted to understand the history behind the app(s), who their stakeholders were and what problems they were trying to solve. The next step was spending time together understanding design and development decisions to see if there were any glaring issues that we could solve together.

As part of the certification process, I would complete a detailed analysis of the app and create a document with screenshots highlighting design and accessibility issues, assigning a severity for each. Here are a few examples:

Final thoughts

Having a published set of guidelines to ground a team like the MCoE was vital in establishing our expertise and building trust with our various partners. Having a resource like this allowed us to not only keep other teams accountable when building apps, but it kept us accountable, too – we had to make sure our documentation was up-to-date and that we were pointing to the latest technologies, whether it was updated design best practices based on major platform updates or new ways of solving common accessibility pitfalls.