Refining a platform for college students and health admin nationwide at Volta.☤
Volta is an integrated health compliance startup that helps universities manage student insurance, immunization, and engagement through automated tools and real-time insights. As a product design intern for half a year, I owned the full redesign of the admin dashboard and side navigation menu and worked on handful features for the mobile app.
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I'd like to give a huge shoutout to Kelly, Alana, Lubna, Tsikata, and the rest of the Volta team for your incredible mentorship. Thank you for taking a chance on me!
Overview
Health management systems have long been unintuitive and outdated. Volta is changing that.
Volta is an all-in-one platform for university admin to manage student and employee health. Built by real doctors, and advised by former university health administrators, the product aims to target and resolve all of the major pain points in campus health. Clients of Volta include the Mayo Clinic, Emory University, and Ohio State!
Volta's platform comprises of a student-facing mobile app and an admin-facing desktop hub.
The student-facing app allows students to send necessary health information (i.e. immunization records) and navigate the school's various health resources. Meanwhile, the desktop website helps university health administrators compile, organize, and efficiently manage that data.
It was fascinating to learn how to design a platform that targeted middle-aged school administrators on one end and college students on the other.
During my seven months on the team, I spearheaded a complete overhaul of the hub dashboard and side navigation menu, conducted a little bit of user research, and made some minor improvements to the mobile app.
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Volta's desktop app, for admin to manage on-campus health data.
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Volta's mobile app for students to submit their health information and explore university health resources.
Dashboard
Remaking Volta's admin dashboard from scratch.
When I joined Volta, their homepage was a little all over the place. Although the modular widget idea allowed for lots of customization, it came at the cost of the interface's intuitiveness.
Let's break down the key issues with Volta's current dashboard:
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Volta's preliminary admin dashboard design. This is the initial state of the modular dashboard.
The modular structure confused administrators more than it helped them.
Beyond the structure of the page confusing a majority of users—remember, the audience of the platform are 40 and 50-year-olds—many of the cards make it difficult for administrators to navigate to other pages. Others simply don't offer useful information at all.
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Sidenote: why would an administrator need to know the weekly weather report on Volta?
The content on the dashboard didn't offer much utility to administrators.
For starters, many key data insights are hidden behind a paywall, and wouldn't be available for the dashboard in the first place. The majority of data is also not very dynamic; that is, after a couple months into the school year, the numbers would start plateauing.
The dashboard is daunting for first-time users.
Volta's dashboard doesn't do a lot of hand-holding to familiarize health administrators to the interface. This makes it difficult for administrators to take full advantage of Volta's platform.
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Much of this data doesn't update often. For example, seeing the quantity of scheduled messages proved to be far less helpful than seeing the content of the messages themselves.
How do we resolve these problems?
For the reasons listed above, I ditched the modular layout made new components that provided more informational and navigational utility to the page, or better helped new users familiarize themselves with the Volta platform.
After a lot of iterations, meetings with the Volta team and stakeholders, here was the design I shipped:
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A new admin dashboard for Volta.
Prioritizing easy onboarding for new users.
With Volta planning to rapidly expand to new schools (and new admin), our team decided that the most important was onboarding users onto the platform. The dashboard has a straightforward five-step onboarding component as well as a component housing Volta tutorial videos for users who are looking for additional support.
Adding support for team-wide updates.
When I spoke to users and Volta's advising board of health professionals, I learned that a major pain point of the hub was the inability for people to see what their coworkers were up to.
Volta didn't have the bandwidth to prioritize creating an entire new page for detailed team updates. To address the feedback in the interim, I created a Recent Activity card for admin to see recent team and student updates. I worked closely with developers and my project manager to ensure that the card was feasible to implement within Volta's time frame.
Improving the utility of each component.
Based on my research, I improved the messages component to allow viewers to view their recently sent announcements. I also added a component that integrates with the user's calendar so they can see upcoming meetings for their day and plan their schedule accordingly.
Side Navigation
My other main task was upgrading Volta's side navigation menu.
This was my first major project at Volta! When I joined the team, Volta's side navigation menu hadn't been updated to hide features that were not available in the clients' price plan.
Beyond that, the old version of the menu was not very space-efficient, causing some ugly scrolling and breakpoint issues.
Before
Volta's old side navigation menu had some awkward overflows on standard desktop viewports.
Apart from the need to support different price plans, I noticed some other moments that I could improve.
- Icons. While the icons for each menu item looked great, they came at the cost of making the menu significantly wider, and causing the component to fall apart at smaller breakpoints (i.e. tablets, or small laptops).
- Fixed content at the bottom. The "Log Out" and "Help" tabs were nice, but locking them at the bottom instead worsened the already-existing overflow issue. The logout option in particular felt strange to include in the menu in general, as admin rarely ever signed out of their Volta account.
- Clarity of information. The top of the side navigation menu links to the users' account, but that was a little unclear since the header text of the button was the name of the university the admin worked for rather than the admin's name itself.
With these thoughts in mind, I made a new side navigation menu that supported "locked features" while also remedying the aforementioned issues.
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It seems a little unnecessary to include the school's name in the profile button—admin already know what school they're working for.
After
My redesign of Volta's side navigation, which is responsive to standard desktop/tablet breakpoints.
Adding extra support for locked tabs.
When clicking on a locked tab in the side navigation, a small popover appears with a nudge to upgrade and unlock the feature. The popover includes a short demo video or thumbnail image of the feature.
Improved submenu navigation.
Unlike the previous iteration, Volta's submenu now smartly auto-collapses inactive submenus. Combined with thinner and more compact buttons, the menu no longer overflows on standard desktop and tablet screen sizes.
Process
I cycled through dozens of different ideas and iterations before shipping these projects.
I received tons of feedback from the design team at Volta, as well as from users and Volta's broader team and advising board. Here are some of the iterations that I cycled through when making the Next Steps component for the dashboard:
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Iterations of the Next Steps component on the dashboard.
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All of these iterations have pros and cons. Ultimately, the design team and I made a choice to prioritize clarity of information over slightly improved navigational utility.
As someone who loves obsessing over details in a design project, it was extremely fun to play around with space, coloring, and layout to see what cool things I could make within Volta's broader design system!
Conclusion
This work now exists in the hands of dozens of universities!
I want to thank the team again for supporting and mentoring me throughout my time. This position was really the one that made me realize how much I enjoyed designing interfaces. Not to mention, it taught me what it meant to ship a product to hundreds of thousands of users. Here are some of the key things I learned:
Sharing at every step of the way.
I used to be really self-conscious of sharing my works-in-progress, but doing daily stand-ups made me become comfortable sharing my projects along every step of the way.
Working within tight schedules.
As a relatively new start-up, Volta often had tight deadlines on when different things needed to be shipped. I learned how to be extremely organized and keep a project on schedule from start to finish.
The importance of good documentation.
With eight different developers, ten different advising board members, and two other product designers on the team, I learned the hard way how important it is to carefully document my work so nothing gets lost in translation!
Thanks for reading!
