Ultrasound Project Y

THIS WORK IS COVERED BY NDA. I HAVE BLURRED ALL ARTIFACTS AND TALKED ABOUT THE WORK IN A VAGUE WAY TO PROTECT THE DETAILS. I HAVE ALSO ALTERED SOME WORDS TO FURTHER CONCEAL THE WORK.

Electrophysiology manages the electrical functions of the heart. Common procedures are to treat for atrial fibrulation and left atrial appendage closers. For AFIB a physician may use ablation to destroy a small amount of heart tissue that’s causing irregular heartbeats. The closures consist if placing a device in the left atrial appendage to block the blood flow.

Role

UX design and research
Managed stakeholder feedback
Strategy
Project manager
Participated Usability studies

Team

Clinical stakeholders
Developer Engineers
Ultrasound Engineers
Product Management
System Architects
Risk

Challenges:

The timeline was truncated
We were short on engineering resources
Multiple stakeholders left the project in the middle and had to be picked back up.
Project was put on hold multiple times for long periods and lost focus
There was a lot of technical debt that kept this feature from being the best that it could be

Results

I am unable to share the exact results. But I chose a vague quote to share.
*”This empowers me to try things — I am less nervous about messing things up beyond return. Because of this I have more confidence I can provide better optimized images.”*

Learnings:

Touch screen behavior is not all equal.
There is layers of code under the touch screens that may effect the touch sensitivity
When pulling your finger off a touch screen things can jump
Gloves effect touch sensitivity
Not all users will touch the controls they way that you anticipate
The way the touch screen is fixed in to position effects where controls should be located

Process

Observations

Observations consisted of sending the research partner to hospital sites to observe therapies, procedures, participants, environments, document findings, define pain points, market gaps and ask questions. A report was produced that was used to inform stakeholders of findings to drive next steps.

Gathered requirements, scenarios and produced user journeys

Worked with system architecture team to gather and understand requirements. Worked with clinical to understand scenarios. From that data I created user journeys.

Identified Users

There are many stakeholders within these procedures. We worked to identify the right target audience within the procedure through asking questions and observing

Audit the current ultrasound system behavior and controls

Broke down each control on the touch screen, main screen and control panel to understand what is needed for the new electrophysiology experience. Included only what was necessary

Benchmark against competitors

Studied competitive systems and peripheral devices to understand their offerings and how they are or aren’t tackling this market

Brainstorm designs

White boarded. Experimented with multiple options to get a feel for how the UI could be interacted with. This mixed up different ideas, tools, controls styles and layouts

Gathered feedback and iterated

This process went on for several weeks with all stakeholders including product management, systems engineering, developers, and clinical stakeholders

Created a coded prototype

We took two options that were chosen by the cross-functional team and created a prototype to get feedback and iterate on. We tested it with clinical stakeholders while simulating the lab environment with the resources that we had