Helping Medical Professionals Help Patients
by HFI
“Excellence in patient care through education, research and innovation”
This is the mission of the Radiological Society of North America, an organization that supports radiologists and other medical professionals in 136 countries around the globe. One of the people making their mission successful is Arthur Benford, the CUA of the Month. Arthur’s role as Assistant Director of Digital Strategy is key to creating and maintaining a website and apps that contribute to physicians’ abilities to help patients.
What is your role?
The title of my role is Assistant Director of Digital Strategy. I work for the Radiological Society of North America. We are an association of over 50,000 radiologists located around the world. My job is to strategize digital efforts by building digital campaigns that drive internal and external messaging through digital engagements.
What excites you about your job?
What excites me about my job is that I am involved in work that helps medical professionals help their patients. It's a very rewarding and satisfying to be able to contribute to the world in this way. Along with that, I'm very excited about being able to brainstorm with doctors, marketing professionals and IT professionals to help reach consumers through various means such as market research, web analytics and customer/stakeholder interviews. By having the ability to lead in various ways, there's never a dull moment at RSNA.
What projects are you currently working on?
Currently, I work on a multitude of projects at RSNA. My biggest project is working on our annual meeting. This is the largest project in the organization and I do a lot to support it. My team is responsible for updating our website with the latest marketing material, gathering statistics to enhance the users experience and building a mobile application to support the event. In addition to that, I am leading the organization as part of a Project Management team. We are responsible for redesigning the entire site and moving to a new CMS. My team is currently building user personas and creating journey maps as we strategize how we will rebuild the site from the user’s perspective. The entire sight is being reworked from the inside out. From colors, to imagery, to content, to user flows, everything is being revamped. All of this is being done with the user research that we have conducted. There are also several other applications that I am working on as part of an overall plan to reach our consumers through digital means.
One project I am working on is to collect data from the radiological community and make it available to the entire community. Another project is to enhance the internal search engine on our current website. Along with these two projects, I'm working to reorganize our learning management system. Like I said, there is never a dull moment here at RSNA.
How does the CUA training help in your daily work?
My CUA training has helped me tremendously! I do not believe I would be where I am today if it were not for this training. My CUA training gave me the foundation of what I needed to be able to design from the users’ experience. Before my training, I was a UI Designer and I designed based on what I felt looked good (to me). Now I design based on my users and how they function. I design based on what they need and how I can help them achieve their goals. I still love beautiful design, but now I'm passionate about "validated" design. I tell my coworkers that design that is validated by what we know our users want and need will trump beautiful design every time. And if you are fortunate enough to have a validated and beautiful design - well then you have hit the jackpot! Without my CUA training, I would have never thought about conducting user interviews, conducting usability testing, analyzing web statistics and so much more. I'm very thankful for my CUA training because it has been a useful tool in my day-to-day work and it helps me create a meaningful user experience for my employer's customers.
What are some of the challenges you face and how do you overcome them?
In my current positions, there are several challenges. As the Assistant Director of Digital Strategy, my most challenging situation is being a liaison between Marketing and IT. That entails helping both groups communicate to create and market the best products for our consumers.
In order to bridge that gap, I learned how to develop a proper design strategy, conduct proper user interviews and ask the right questions, analyze workflows, create user personas that match user's expectations, develop journey maps, and last but not least, conduct usability testing.
By doing these things effectively and consistently, I am looked at as a leader for digital strategy at RSNA. The training from HFI was invaluable and critical for me to overcome the challenges that I face in my current role.
How do you see your role as a digital strategist changing in the next few years?
That's a good question. I see the role evolving more into brainstorming and analytics. I know those sound like different ends of the spectrum, but let me explain.
I see a need for someone like me to help our stakeholders think of ideas, to help form them into a solid concept. A lot of the time, individuals have the start of a good idea but they do not know how to express it or visualize it. I see there is an opportunity for me to help them going forward. My colleagues know about the training I have from HFI and trust me to help them formulate those ideas. To that end, my Director has authorized me to hire a UX Manager to take over my day to day duties (i.e. wire framing, conducting interviews, user testing, etc.) so that I can focus more so on developing solid strategies.
On the analytics side, I see my role evolving more into gathering and analyzing statistical data. We not only analyze the impact of trends and lifestyle changes to determine where we stand at the present, but we also project the trend forward to see where we should be. In addition to that, I'd like to use persuasion and trust to design products for the future, as well as being able to identify and capitalize on opportunities where persuasive design will enable success. These aspects are all part of the Certified User Experience certification through HFI.
My hope is that I will be able to earn the CXA advanced certification within the next few years to make me even more efficient in my role now and possibly put me in line for a new role as a Director of Digital Strategy in the future.