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

Context

Patients who enroll in clinical trials report health data to help researchers evaluate efficacy of the new treatments.

Medidata digitized the process to get better data faster.

User & Goals

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

Problem

Before this new platform, study builders either custom coded each study or used the legacy product which is very outdated.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

Part 1 Building a survey

I refreshed the survey builder with a drag and drop pattern which significantly increased usability, and designed survey scales and templates specific to clinical trial use cases.

I also contributed patterns to the design system like the rich text editor.

Part 2 Managing translations and approvals

The most tedious part of study builders’ jobs is facilitating the communication between translation vendors and authorities who approves the final versions. I interviewed users and summarized their workflow in the service blueprint to understand the experience and pain points.

Understand and challenge status quo

When study builder share the WIP surveys+translations, they take screenshots of every page of the survey they create with a test device for stakeholder review.

“The only way to generate those screenshots is to go through on a device and manually generated one by one by one, and then pull that into a document, which is extremely time consuming. This is what Medidata has been doing since before I joined.”
— Study Builder

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.

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

Two ideas are: 1. Automate: Users click one button to create and export file.
2. New way to share: Stakeholders access surveys via a link.

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.

Part 3 Starting a library service, no more work from scratch

So far we’ve built a solution to create surveys from scratch. But just like a Figma component, surveys can be reused. This will save users even more time. It also offers great business value customers because they can leverage this service to build and maintain their own libraries.

In this 0-1 project, 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