This medical technologies company faced challenges with fragmented solutions across multiple applications. The lack of system integration leads to user confusion and increased cognitive load, pushing users to rely on spreadsheets for operations. These inefficiencies and poor user experiences necessitated a cohesive design approach to scale the business effectively.
Users
Clinical Operations
Call Center Agents/Clinicians
Internal Administration
Research
Interviews with stakeholders and executive leadership
Survey of ~150 daily users
Usability testing of existing applications
Critical path analysis of user workflows and jobs to be done
Finding #1
Observations reveal that users often resort to using spreadsheets alongside the applications to manage patient data and workflows, indicating shortcomings in the existing solutions.
Finding #2
Usability testing uncovers interface inconsistencies and navigation challenges across the five applications, contributing to user dissatisfaction and errors.
Finding #3
Analyzing user workflows and tasks reveals redundancies and inefficiencies in the current system, highlighting opportunities for streamlining and optimization.
The biggest challenge in this design is to effectively structure information in a way that serves both the use cases and departments scattered among the legacy applications. Effective information architecture in this use case required context-specific organization in the many detail views, as well as an intuitive connection of the overall sections of the organization.
User-Friendly Categorization: Hierarchical structuring ensures easy navigation and accessibility, making information straightforward to locate and use.
Predictability: Focus on uniform structures and patterns across sections enhances user familiarity, promoting a seamless user experience.
Flexibility: Designed to grow and adapt, the architecture maintains structural integrity while meeting evolving user needs.
If at first you don't succeed, iterate.
For this project I kept most of my low-fidelity design in Figma, so I could quickly version and iterate during initial meetings. It's an essential part of my process for refining ideas and spotting issues early. By quickly sketching and prototyping, I can explore different concepts without heavy investment, gathering feedback from users and stakeholders along the way. It validates assumptions, reveals hidden needs, and guides the next steps. This process helps me create a user-centered, functional, and effective final product, minimizing the risk of costly revisions later.
A few tips:
Keep It Simple: Use basic sketches and wireframes for quick changes.
Get Feedback: Share early and often for valuable insights.
Function First: Prioritize layout and core functions aesthetics.
Don't share early designs in color: Feedback that someone doesn't like a color you chose can be distracting at this stage.😑
Start building, keep iterating.
In this stage, I begin to present the high fidelity mockups developed for the project. These detailed designs represent the proposed final visual style, incorporating all branding elements, color schemes, typography, and interactions. They serve as a crucial step in validating the design direction before development, allowing stakeholders to visualize the end product, provide feedback, and ask questions.
Crucially, this step shouldn't slow down innovation. Can we start building? Yes. Will things continue to change? Absolutely.
