Overview

My role

As a product designer, I worked on the design team which consisted of seven members and we shared responsibility by supporting multiple sections of the supply chain. I am the designated platform designer and I collaborate with three different product managers and their corresponding engineering teams. But being assigned to platform doesn’t mean I don’t get to work on some of our other areas such as ordering, collection, and manufacturing. In fact, a lot of our work crosses over so I am always collaborating with others beyond the platform teams, and many of our research exercises include stakeholders across the entire company.

My main responsibilities include user research, prototyping & designs, and facilitating brainstorming exercises through visualization to inform executive decisions and product road mapping.

Understanding the Problem

Multiple of users involved

The fact that the end-to-end workflow for a single therapy includes over a dozen users means that we had to make sure that each one of them were having their needs met. This means that each user should be able to perform their set of tasks with as little hassle or confusion as possible, all while being able to hand the responsibility over to the next designated personnel as seamlessly as possible.

Privacy and security measure made customers and end-users difficult to contact

Since users consisted of individuals such as nurses, pharmacists, and manufacturers it was difficult to get direct face time with them and most of our input would have to be through proxies.

Complexity made it difficult to communicate and transfer knowledge

Each step involved in cell and gene therapy consisted of actions and vocabulary that are unfamiliar, and each concept took a long time to explain. Mix-ups and misunderstandings happen often even if the people involved in the discussion are subject matter experts.

Conducting Research

Introducing stakeholders to design team’s template for user research

Prior to interviewing users, we recruit relevant stakeholders to work on internal an internal project that we label as “incubation”. These incubation projects utilize techniques and activities to inform us on how to properly approach a current or future company initiative. Product design (in this case, me) takes lead on facilitation of the entire effort.

The steps for this process are:

• Recruit and onboard immediate members for the project

• List out our assumptions for an exercise facilitated by the product designer (me)

• Core team performs activities as needed to validate/invalidate assumptions

• End-of-project findings synthesis and share-out

Listing our assumptions for later testing

Using Miro as our medium for this activity, I facilitated a collaborative exercise where we listed out our assumptions on the topic. These assumptions varied from our users, our potential solutions, and the problem/market fit.

Prioritizing generated assumptions

For the next step we placed our assumptions onto a 2x2 grid to prioritize the level of importance for each assumption using criteria agreed upon by the participants:

• Y-axis: Certainty - as a team, we have little or high confidence that we know about this one

• X-axis: Existential threat - If we get this wrong there is no risk or high risk that the project will fail

Assumptions placed in the upper-right quadrant were considered high-priority since they had low certainty and higher existential threat, and those would be the ones we focused on in the next step.

Turning the prioritize assumptions into action items for the core team to validate/invalidate

At this point we converted the colored stickies into cards in Trello, where we added detailed information and assigned a point person responsible for completing each item. This enabled us to hold ourselves accountable and make sure we did not lose momentum throughout this project.

User interviews

After having some assumptions to craft a script around, we drafted our questions into a document where we could reference during user interviews and take notes to capture their input. We used wireframes so that interviewees didn’t have to respond to the abstract, and made sure to perform a quick synthesis after each session to make sure we captured reactions so that it would be easier for us to reference later on.

Sharing our key findings

Finally, after gathering as much feedback from user interviews to validate/invalidate our assumptions, we shared our results to extended stakeholders via presentation as well as access to all the relevant documents that included the details of our work.

This helped inform the next steps in terms of roadmap and executive decision making, inspiring some of the following content below.

Building Personas

Representing behaviors, needs, and goals with a single name

Taking what we learned from our research, we then create a persona that team members can use as reference to understand who are design solutions are intended for. This is the persona example for Arlene, an apheresis nurse. By capturing all her goals and responsibilities under a name we are then able to communicate much more efficiently when it comes to all the complex steps within the collection process of cell and gene therapy.

Mapping out all the users and how they relate to each other

Even though each persona has their own individual set of needs, we can benefit from finding the similarities they share as well. For example, personas at the point of care will not need to worry about the overall status of an order, while those at the pharma company will want that visibility as they interact with our UI. Or we can also remind ourselves that our internal implementation engineers are still users with their own unique set of needs and responsibilities.

Using what we have so far to help us create the user interface

At this point, the complex workflow was not as ambiguous as it was in the beginning. We were now able to construct the workflows with a high level on confidence since each step had a persona associated with it.

Creating the UI for Each Workflow

Working with Functional Implementation Managers and establishing design guidelines

In this step of the process we incorporated the insights from our research findings while also communicating with customers who agreed to proceed with us as a solution, which effectively meant that they would collaborate with our Functional Implementation Managers to customize a working solution for them. This was how we validated the details for each step of the workflow.

It was also a collective effort amongst the design team. We utilized components in Figma to ensure consistency and best practices as we all provided designs in our respective areas. The use of components allowed us to rapidly iterate and deliver designs back to Functional Implementation Managers and customers so that their discussions can progress as quickly as possible.

Ordering

For ordering, the coordinating nurse completes most of the workflow and the Case Manager reviews and signs off giving final approval.

Collection

The workflow for the Apheresis nurse consisted of steps that included features such as double verification to ensure safety. This does add a few extra steps, but a patient’s life depends on correct execution so there needed to be a balance between simple UI interaction and safety precautions.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing workflow is unique in the sense that any lab staff personnel could pick up the task where it was left off. In this small visual it exhibits a scenario where Steph, Quela and Maria are alternating responsibilities to move the order along the supply chain in the manufacturing site.

Results, Reflection, and What Comes Next

Customers using our product

As of now, Vineti is live with over 20 customers and helping them orchestrate their cell and gene therapies. The latest performance report (April 2022) shows that we have 1,466 users and 256 patients treated through our personalized therapy management.

Reflecting on the process

The main takeaways I have are the benefits of using the persona template as well as having a well-documented process for user research that can be applied multiple times. For example, the work showcased here was for autologous therapy, and since most of our customers are also looking for a solution to help them with their allogeneic therapies we have an opportunity to apply this successful process for that as well.

I also found tremendous value in listing out our assumptions and going outside of the office to validate/invalidate them with our users. Some of my past experience has shown me that reaching external users within a private business can be very difficult and ultimately slow research efforts to a grinding halt, and emulating a scrum team with daily updates can help maintain that momentum through difficult times.

What comes next

We can pursue the business opportunities in allogeneic therapies and can also work on making our software platform-ready so that customers can configure their own workflow and expand exponentially. As soon as executive leadership makes our upcoming goals clear we can begin to gather intel by performing user research through our honed methods to gain as much knowledge as we can about how customers would prefer to deploy their own therapies.