Note: Like a lot of the work I did on healthcare software, I am not allowed to show very much! If you’d like to see where the company is now, you can go to their site here to see an expansion on foundation of work I did.

Overview

While I was at Lightmatter, I worked with Lokavant, a company that manages and tracks clinical drug trials, with a special focus on Serious Adverse Events (SAEs). The FDA defines SAEs as “An adverse event is any undesirable experience associated with the use of a medical product in a patient. The event is serious and should be reported to FDA when the patient outcome is death, hospitalization, disability, permanent damage, birth defects, [etc..].”

I was tasked with both designing and defining the user interface as well as conducting user research using clickable prototypes to gather feedback on the interfaces I had designed.

The Challenge

We were given an extremely short 8 week timeline to design an interface that both acted as a full-scale clinical study management tool as well as allowed users to report and manage detailed SAEs (dangerous side effects). Each section of the product required simple, but effective data visualization concepts to help users determine if any of the data was indicative of an SAE or if the data was simply an outlier.

User Testing

We conducted 8 weeks of product testing with 15+ clinical trial software experts. We guided our design through user-testing portals, where we shared clickable prototypes. With a testing protocol in hand, we had users perform tasks and gathered feedback. We iterated the interface based on their input, repeating the process until most users found it both easy to use and valuable for their work.

Data Visualization Examples

Often data visualization can be rather drab given the context, but I wanted to share a few pieces of the interface that I was able to create that I was fairly proud of, that users found very helpful, and that the engineering team wasn’t mad at either!

Outcome

I was able to provide the basic design infrastructure for the interface as well as deliver solid user-tested designs that are still being used today. I also got to meet some of the coolest people who do some of the most tedious detective work to discover serious health side effects within drug trials.

The work we did for Lokavant also won Lightmatter a year-long contract with one of their associated companies, of which you can read about the work I did on that here.

My Takeaway

Though we only had 8 weeks to complete the work we did, I’m super proud of my team for the work we were able to accomplish. Having even one solid team member to collaborate with helps so much in accomplishing huge tasks very quickly!

Clinical Trial Software Design