Avantgarde

An Electronic Patient Reported Outcome (ePRO) app for the clinical trial participants for their health status, medication and appointments and central location for their trial participation related information.

Role

Design Team Leader

UX Designer & Researcher

Team Composition

2 UX Designers, 2 iOS App Developers, 1 Business Analyst

+ Back-end team

Client

Medavante Pro-Phase

Project Duration

7 months (Alpha Release)

Design Tools

Adobe CS suite, Balsamiq mockups, Infragistics Indigo studio

Project Overview

Medavante Pro-Phase is one of the leading Clinical trial outcome rating service providers for CNS disorders drugs. Their main product offering ‘Virgil’ platform, used in clinical trials around the world to improve efficiency and quality at research sites while providing study sponsors with immediate access to high-quality clinical trial data.

Avantgarde app is part of the Virgil platform that is created for study participants to self-report their health status, medication, and appointment schedule in a daily diary format and also keep track of their trial participation-related information.

Releasing this app will eliminate the need for the patients to write down the data and post or send the papers to the site, also it will provide more quality data as the app captures the data more frequently and on a regular basis. The app adds value to the platform to make it attractive for clinical trial sites.

Research & Data Collection

CNS drug trial-related applications have to consider various factors like patient mental and physical condition, caregiver status, regulatory, security, and confidentiality. All of these have to be maintained without compromising the convenience of use and simplicity for the end-user, in this case, the patient or the caregiver.

Data sources

• Interviewing Clinicians, Site investigators, and trial participants to extract information for usability understanding and ideation.

• Identifying user pain points and use conditions under physical and mental challenges (memory loss, forgetfulness, motor-function issues).

• Determining regulatory and confidentiality constraints.

• Analyzing other applications within the platform

• Benchmarking other trial and patient health condition related apps

• Studying Branding and style-guide of the organization

Persona, Empathy map & Experience map

Based on collected data we have decided to create personas of 3 different patient types that entail unique challenges for each type. It also became apparent that creating the Empathy map and the Journey map will help us to understand these users and their challenges to address.

Process

• Interviewing 7-8 participants and caregivers for each persona type.

• Going through manually collected Daily diary records

• Finding out common pain patterns and possible solutions

• Verifying findings with the clinicians and site investigators

• Analyzing possibilities of addressing the user pain points with outside-the-norm solutions like gradual Notifications, haptic feedback while interacting, step-by-step video tutorial for onboarding, use of visuals for login, etc.

Design Decisions and Approach

• Show absolutely necessary information on-screen

• Interaction options for each screen should be minimal, obvious, and clearly legible

• Use unique icons to make the choices and options instantly identifiable

• User should be guided through the immediate workflow without any distraction

• Use audible and haptic feedback for interaction confirmation

• Use unique audible and visual notifications for reminders and schedules

• Make the help option instantly accessible and with appropriate contextual information

• Security features should not require memorizing and typing

Wireframes & Click Prototypes

With the design decisions in place, I went ahead with wireframes, verified them with the client, and then created the click prototype for the user test. The click prototype was tested with some real users and the internal test team.

Screenflow

We have created screen flow for different features and functions, especially for different question types that include tapping on different parts of a given image or identifying the symptoms the user is showing through branching of questions.

Theme Exploration

We have looked into three different themes for the app and also different variations of UI elements for accessibility for the group of users with light to moderate visual impairment.

Final Design

It took quite a number of user test sessions and iterations to finalize the workflow and move on to the final design mockup. Also, the organization was going through rebranding so we also had to change the app look and feel before handing it over to the developers.

Final Project Outcome and Business Impact

The app has become a valuable addition to the Platform offering smooth, unbiased, and high-quality trial data for Clinical Trial SItes. The app, alongside other attractive features of the platform, created an attractive package for the Clinical trial sites all over the globe which led to a big acquisition of the company by one of the biggest conglomerates in that industry a few months after completing the project.

Learnings & what could have been done differently

We did well with the user test sessions, including and keeping the users from the very beginning of the design phase, as the end product was highly welcomed by the majority of the users.

We have spent quite some amount of effort trying to solve user identification/access issues between patient and caregiver in unique ways, which in the end was implemented simply as 2 different profiles. Doing a design sprint early about this feature could have saved us some effort.

Gains

I was highly praised by the client for the successful completion of the project and for delivering something beyond their initial expectation. I have assigned to lead the design team that was working on multiple different products of the platform.

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