Cedar + UserTesting

Cedar found itself facing both a great challenge and opportunity when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, heavily impacting the healthcare startups home base of New York City.

As Cedar’s team was quickly readjusting to working from home, healthcare providers—Cedar’s primary customers—were facing their own unique set of challenges. As these frontline workers were dealing with the difficult task of providing a great patient experience during unprecedented times, Cedar was quick to adapt to this new normal and provide its customers with tools and solutions to proactively communicate with patients, provide more flexible payment plans, and prolong billing cycles.

The company’s work didn't stop there. Cedar's ultimate mission was to humanize healthcare, which meant learning more about the unique circumstances impacting patients and strategizing ways to help them plan for the future.

With this in mind, Cedar set out to learn about the challenges facing the healthcare industry, one patient story at a time.

To better serve their customers, Cedar wanted to understand the unique needs and problems patients were facing outside of the moments they were using Cedar's product.

Cedar’s team, however, faced several challenges as they embarked on the quest to collect this information. To start, Cedar’s small design team already lacked time and resources to conduct a study of this size. And with social distancing guidelines in place, the company also had to determine a way to safely interview customers and do so in a way that respected their privacy and current circumstances.

“UserTesting solved all these challenges for us. With the help of the new COVID-19 templates, we were able to quickly create two tests around the impact of the pandemic on healthcare billing and healthcare checking,” says Diana Ye, Product Design Lead.

With these solutions in place, Cedar’s team was able streamline the data collection process by conducting interviews, collecting video content, and surveying customers all in one video session.

Amy Stillman, Cedar’s Head of Design, points out that UserTesting was also valuable in helping her team establish a sense of trust with the patient they interviewed. “We were able to talk to people in their own homes in a safe way, and that was very convenient for them and. And as they got more comfortable, they shared more.”

Cedar’s design team created multiple highlight reels focusing on different insights to share with the rest of the company. The videos collected allowed Cedar’s larger team to better understand patients and identify ways to improve their healthcare experience.

Most importantly, these insights have provided Cedar with a roadmap of future product enhancements, with many of the key priorities identified through these interviews already making their way into the company’s next design projects. Currently, the company is working on solutions aimed at improving healthcare affordability, payment options, and customer communication.

“Thanks to the insights we collected through UserTesting, we are now able to better understand what patients need during these tough times and can work with our customers to meet those demands,” Ye said.