Providence Healthcare / ValueLens Help

ValueLens is a financial reporting platform used by healthcare finance professionals across Providence Health. As the platform grew, so did the support burden. Users couldn't find answers on their own, onboarding new cohorts required heavy involvement from product and dev teams, and analysts were spending time being confused instead of doing their jobs.

I was brought in to research, design, test, and launch a complete Help ecosystem. The result was a suite of interconnected tools: a searchable Help Center, a context-aware sidebar, inline tooltips, first-time user onboarding modals, a Financial Definitions Library, and a headless CMS. Together they gave users everything they needed to help themselves.

Users needed help, but the system couldn't help them. Interviews revealed several critical issues:

• No centralized Help Center or searchable knowledge base
• Help content scattered across PDFs, email threads, external websites, and tribal knowledge
• First-time users struggled to understand core concepts and financial terminology
• Training required heavy support from product and dev teams
• All existing help content required developers to manually update text

The result: slow onboarding, repeated support tickets, and frustration among high-value financial analysts.

I led the end-to-end UX effort, from user interviews and contextual inquiry through information architecture, wireframes, prototypes, usability testing, and systems design. I also led CMS research and implementation guidance, and drove iterative improvements based on ongoing user feedback.

I started with deep discovery sessions with ValueLens power users, financial analysts, and reporting experts to uncover what "help" looks like in tools they enjoy, where they get stuck in ValueLens, their mental models for financial definitions, and what they expect during onboarding. Those insights shaped a holistic, interconnected help system built across six components.

Help Center

Designed a structured, searchable Help Center available from all pages, containing how-to guides, report workflows, troubleshooting steps, feature walkthroughs, terminology, and video content. Built on a CMS that scales easily as the product grows and is simple for content managers to update and tag to specific areas of the platform.

On-Report Help Sidebar

Designed a persistent, context-aware sidebar that follows users across all reports. It gave users the ability to toggle overlayed Help Points, access deep articles specific to their current view, and submit tickets and feedback directly to the product team, without leaving the report.

Help Points (Tooltips)

Created an inline micro-explanation tooltip feature called Help Points, embedded directly in the interface. These explained calculations, filters, metrics, and terminology specific to the ValueLens platform, designed for quick scanning and reducing onboarding time by removing guesswork at the moment of confusion.

First Time User Experience (FTUE)

Built a series of onboarding modals triggered on a user's first load of each report. They included welcome information, a video, links to interactive page tours, and help content specific to the loaded report, easing new users into a data-rich tool without requiring a live training session.

Financial Definitions Library

Integrated a library of finance and clinical terminology used in ValueLens directly into the tool, pulled from trusted internal data sources. Replaced static PDF lists that users complained about or simply didn't know existed, making critical definitions findable in context, exactly when needed.

Rapid Content Creation via Headless CMS

To empower non-technical content creators, I evaluated CMS options and led the adoption of a headless CMS approved for internal use at Providence. This enabled real-time content editing without dev involvement, faster article creation, instant addition of video and audio, and version control. It removed a major bottleneck and saved the dev team dozens of hours per month.