Ideas for *intuitive* bulk action pattern for a medical CRM?

Question

Hi everybody,

I'm designing a patient list page (shown above) for a medical CRM, and two main user needs are sending messages to multiple patients at once, and deleting multiple patients at once. I've been exploring a variety of bulk action patterns to facilitate these tasks, but I haven't come across any that are simple or intuitive enough to fit our users' technical ability (think nurses in their 50's and 60's).

Do you have any thoughts on what might be a simple, effective UI enabling these two bulk actions?

Some options I've considered:

1. A "bulk action" dropdown on the page header next to the New Patient button. Clicking it would reveal a menu with the options "Send Message" and "Delete." However, I'm hesitant to hide these actions in a dropdown that has potential to be overlooked
2. An action bar that replaces the values on the column headers when a checkbox is ticked. I've seen this pattern before, but I'm not sure if it's good practice to hide info like that, even temporarily, especially in a medical tool. Plus it might be a bit disorienting for users
3. A sticky bottom action bar that appears when a checkbox is ticked. Main concern here is visibility, especially for users using large monitors.

Thank you!

Answer 1

The "bulk action" dropdown sounds fairly similar to what's seen in gmail so that seems like a safe bet that a large chunk of your users have seen it before and will expect that behaviour. A clear label and potentially highlighting it when users select more than one patient would be even better.

You should test that against your column header action bar idea. Although I'm not certain why the action bar would need to replace the column headers. Couldn't you have both?

Side little bit of food for thought, what are the users needs for bulk emailing patients? Bulk email systems usually have someone send something accidentally or confusing at least once, we've all seen it. Remember if you're designing a system that can message a ton of people those people all also your users. Anything we can do to safeguard them from frustrating, confusing or erroneous messages?