2x-ed Survey Creation Speed

Timeline: 6 months

Team: 1 PD + 2 PMs + 2 Tech Leads

Role: Solo designer who owns everything from design to research

In modern day clinical trials, patients report symptoms through periodic surveys on their phones.

myMedidata mobile experience credit to Jesi Zhang

These patient experiences are created by Medidata’s study builders. They use the platform that I design to build surveys, schedule surveys, and manage translations for global studies.

Core experience 1 - build surveys

Core experience 2 - schedule surveys

Core experience 3 - translation management

Before this new platform, study builders either custom coded each study or used the legacy product which is very outdated.

Legacy system

User experiences overall has also been badly ignored because the platform is currently an internal tool.

User interviews

Study builders needed to work long hours and the study build timeline lasted as long as 12 weeks.

My design goal is to reduce the effort and time it takes to build a study.

Business metric: number of studies built on the new platform
Stretch goal: thoroughly improve the product so that customers can configure studies themselves

To achieve these goals, my team aligned on three sequential steps.

Refresh design language
Design impactful features
Build strategic service

Step 1 Refresh the design language.

I refreshed all pages of the product by adopting the new design system which significantly increased usability.

I also contributed patterns to the design system such as drag and drop, rich text editor, etc. These designs are unique to clinical use cases which requires more advanced interactions than typical 2B products.

Step 2 Design impactful features.

What are the most impactful features? The features that save study builders most trouble and time.

During this step, study builders are sharing the WIP surveys+translations with stakeholders in the form of screenshots. They take screenshots of every page of the survey they create with a test device for stakeholder review.

Number of languages, supported screen sizes, branching logic, scheduling windows, rounds of review etc. all exponentially increase the volume of work. For more explanation, please refer to the research share out.

Synthesizing interview findings, I mapped all people and jobs involved in study build and it became obvious translations is the lengthiest process.

Can we design a smarter way to share surveys with stakeholders?

Two ideas are:

1. Auto generate screenshot file: Users click one button to export all the screens to a pdf.

2. Share surveys via a link: Stakeholders access the latest version without test accounts.

Align Without Hi-fi

To discuss the ideas with my team, I created this breadboard to show key components of the two concepts and connections of the interfaces without a particular visual design, expediting the iterations.

Breadboard shows “places“, “affordances“, and “connections“. Places are things you can navigate to, like screens, dialogs, or menus that pop up. Affordances are things the user can act on, like buttons and fields. Connection lines show how the affordances take the user from place to place.

We crossed out the second idea, share via link, because it’s too engineering heavy, saving it for the future. The iterated breadboard enables engineers to start backend work while I design in high fidelity.

Work Multi-thread

*What is a breadboard?

Drive product decision with research

I conducted more research to help gather requirements. I learned that it is a must to show all of the branching and logic of the survey, and it is a very nice to have if we allow flexibility in what could be saved in the document. So I designed the modal where study builders make selections on what to include in the file.

Validated results

The new screenshot export tool reduced the study build timeline by 2 weeks. 100% of users found the feature very useful.

Step 3 Build strategic service

So far we’ve built a perfect solution to create survey from scratch. But just like a Figma component, surveys can be reused. To further increase the speed of study build, we need to start letting study builders reuse surveys they’ve built and maintain those in a library.

In this 0-1 service, I was a key contributor in scoping and defining requirements. The designs I created set the pattern. This service scaled across 2 other teams that create different kinds of “Figma components“ for building clinical trials.

User flow of library service

Study builder view

Librarian view

Impact

Study build time reduced from 12 to 6 weeks. Up to mid 2024, 5 studies built with this new platform are live and 32 more contracted are being built as we speak.

I am extremely proud of my journey with this team. Together, we continuously shipped worthwhile products, elevated our design maturity, and kept iterating on the way we collaborate. We built both a great product and a great team.

I honed my skills in executing and validating designs and grew to delivering strategy and becoming the subject matter expert that people go to for questions. For the opportunities I was given, and the people I got to work with, I’m truly grateful.

Kind words from my amazing team