As a designer, I worked for a couple of health-tech startups in Oxfordshire with NDA.
TL;DR
Startup projects have various constraints such as a lack of resources and delivering at a fast pace. As an experienced designer, every project focused on visual artefacts and their optimized solutions following the best practices and general design principles to meet business requirements.
The design objective was to create wireframes that would meet the business requirements and contain the content for the prescription information.
Challenges
Business requirements
Doctors are exposed to work in the very hectic environment and have multiple responsibilities. Given that they are already working in the tech-ridden environment, the client system could be felt like burdensome. They may be not particularly interested in using the system but asked to adopt it in their existing working process depending on the local hospital's policy.
The client seems to see that the data and websites regarding the specific diseases could be beneficial both for the general public and doctors and they wanted to expand their business ideas to a wider context of use and population globally.
The majority of people are unfamiliar with the client's business idea and how it can benefit them. In particular, doctors were more likely struggle to adopt the new information system considering the complexity of the business idea and the existing workflow for doctors.
Solutions
Since there was a lack of resources to conduct user research with doctors, the initial wireframes were focused on overcoming the challenges; Knowing that doctors are the primary users for the system, the key concept of the design solution was to minimize any frictions that could hamper doctors from the easy onboarding. They are reducing the learning curve for doctors, creating the intuitive user interface that doesn't require any training or a manual for users, breaking down the complicate work process into smaller and digestible steps, ensuring the whole process is visible, and adopting chunking technique throughout the wireframes for a clear layout to enhance memorization and memory recalls.
Scalable Design System
The design objective was to create the design system to enable engineers and designers collectively develop and maintain the user interface while meeting all the business' needs to expand their sphere for a wider population globally.
Challenges
Design requirements
The client wanted to expand their business idea with multiple subsidiary websites for different types of disease or location. However, I realized that there was no clear design guidelines or design system that could help developers and designers work more collaboratively and effectively to manage their design assets.
As a designer, I was also concerned that the brand identity could be wishy-washy as time went on and at the risk of losing consistency in maintaining the current identity even from the early on without a design system.
The client did not have a designer and developers usually decided how to design a certain feature based on the business requirement.
Solutions
Design Guidelines
The guidelines was expected to provide more consistent and cohesive visual alignment and layout throughout the websites.
Design Tokens
The website was originally design by an agency. Many elements were updated by me depending on its needs. However, over time, it became clear that key aspects such as scalable UI, responsive design, and accessibility were not prioritized. Therefore, I aimed to ensure a high-quality visual design by providing tokens for engineers.
Components
Every component that would be likely to used over time was created and stored in the components so that anyone within the client's team could use them freely. This would prevent them from breaking the visual rules and making arbitrary design decisions for the them which often leads to inconsistent and visually displeasing for end-users.
Patient diagnosis reporting system
The design objective was to create a printed report both for patients and clinicians which would be provided after the analysis of the patient's data from the client's software.
Challenges
Since a product manager and designer, myself were not given much information, Desk research and user research were absolutely necessary. However, the client's software was still new to most clinicians and even the technology to analyse various neurodegenrative diseases and how they were analysed appeared to require some degree of training and education for clinicians.
The domain was unfamiliar and there was a lack of information that was being held back by engineers from the outset. This was another startup project which did not have a user-centred designer within their team. In addition, there was politic and power dynamic issue within the company.
Solutions
Competitor analysis
User research
After initial desk research, a product manager and I had converged our ideas on how to design user interview's questionnaires. Knowing that we had a scarce of information, we decided to speak to various clinicians who are specialized in neurodegenerative diseases such as psychiatrist and neurologist.
Due to a lack of resources, user interviews were mainly conducted. As a user-centered designer working for start-ups, I often face difficulties in gaining support for comprehensive research. Many clients do not fully acknowledge the importance of research or understand how to collect and utilize data effectively. They frequently demand quick turnarounds, making it even harder to demonstrate the impact of user-centered design, which is often difficult to measure.
Given our limited resources, we developed interview questionnaires focused on understanding clinicians' workflows for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases and their working environments, including the technologies they use. We also asked about their familiarity with the client's system to gauge their understanding and explore how the system could be integrated into their existing workflows.
Data Analysis and Synthesis
The thematic analysis was adopted and the details of analysis and synthesis can be found from the Miro board below.
Output
Considering many vernaculars and frameworks that were developed by the client were not familiar with most participants from the research, the reporting system and software required the more user-centred design approach in order to solve potential complex usability issues for many unfamiliar and ground-breaking technologies.
