In 2017 Common Code began working with Donna, Vitas, Phil and Annie, co-founders of MEERQAT (Map-enabled experiential review Quality Assessment Tools) and BPCLETool (Best Practice Clinical Learning Environment Tool). When we first started working with them, their team had successfully built and shipped BPCLETool, helping health organisations assess and improve their performance against best practice in clinical learning environments.

Our small team of two UX/UI designers and a project manager were tasked with helping MEERQAT to reimagine organisational process assessment and improvement in the cloud.

MEERQAT and their processes are founded on in-person, collaborative workshopping, and any tool we created would need to work in concert with those face to face processes, but also allow for a new type of remote, self guided format. The themes of collaboration and the forms it would take were a massive part of the idea work that went on in those early days establishing a direction for the new tool.

Gabriel Reyes and I set about workshopping various approaches with the MEERQAT team and worked with them to arrive at a foundational format for the new platform. We started by interviewing stakeholders and workshopping with the MEERQAT team to establish an ideal User Journey Map on which to base the structure of the new platform.

The basic building blocks of the MEERQAT platform are Process (what it looks like and how things works for that organisation), assessment, rating, concensus and then actions to improve processes as outputs of the facilitated workshops.

"The key to improvement is learning and the key to learning is the ability to transform raw experience into insights. Structured conversations powered by MEERQAT enable this transformation. Using MEERQAT as a quality improvement tool helps teams reflect on what they do, what works, what doesn’t and why."
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MEERQAT

Process in the new MEERQAT platform was represented as a visual map. The team calls them Basemaps. Kind of like a base camp for the assessment journey? I'm not sure, but each Basemap has a set of "Nodes": Inputs, Outputs, Steps. Each of those steps is analysed by the team using the tool.

Each "Node" on a map is rated by the team using the tool, and if there is a common feeling that that step in the organisation's processes is not working well, or if there's a lot of disagreement re wether it's working well or not, then the next step we designed was targetted at getting the group to talk, discuss what's going wrong in that step of org process, and create actions with accountble people assigned to make positive change on that process.

The MEERQAT team really know their stuff when it comes to process assessment and improvement. They've been at it their whole professional careers. It's always such a pleasure and honour to work with true professionals who know their industry inside out. In MEERQAT's case, they're also trailblazers and innovators in the space, which is doubly exciting to work with.

In collaboration with a team of Common Code developers, the first iteration of the MEERQAT platform was built and shipped, using Django and JS/Meteor front end components. More recently the front end was updated to use ReactJS, a more modern framework. The back end still runs on Django (Python).

After the launch of the initial MEERQAT platform, we were lucky enough to be able to continue working with them to iterate on the project, adding new features and updates. One was a whole new part of the platform allowing users to create, edit and customise their own organisational process maps on which to base regular assessments and work at improvements.

MEERQAT have since signed up some really huge organisations to use the platform and are building on the initial product 5 years after those first designs were built by a dev team. It's inspiring to see it progress and succeed. The underlying design, components, systems behind the platform have howerver remained largely unchanged, and I feel the product looks as fresh, pragmatic and clear as it ever did.