About the client
Fujifilm Sonosite creates ultrasound systems and medical informatics solutions along with ultrasound transducers and ultrasound accessories, credited for advancing medicine by bringing ultrasound to the point of care.
Timeframe
Jan 2021 - Jun 2021
Collaborators
Ziyue Li:UX Research and UX Design
Christopher Moreno: UX Research and UX Design
Michelle Gao: UX Research and UX Design
Sunny Cui: UX Research and UX Design
Skills
Interview
Persona
Information architecture
User-Centered Design
Usability Testing
Tools
Miro, Figma, Adobe XD
Background and Goal
ultrasound product development teams are facing challenges such as usability, portability, replacement costs and durability. The variety of challenges makes it difficult for product development teams to build one system, thus requiring an extensive amount of data and knowledge about the different use cases and environments the ultrasound devices are found in.
The goal of our project is to build an internal visualization tool for Sonosite to analyze ultrasound system data and facilitate the development of ultrasound devices by creating insightful data visualizations. After first round of data collection, we formulate the research question to design this tool:
“How can we provide accessible and compelling data visualizations to satisfy the needs of the SonoSite product development team to create intuitive data visualizations, communicate information efficiently, and support cross-functional teams to make decisions?”
User Research Process
After scholarly literature review on current problems of portable ultrasound machines and talking to our Sponser Sonosite team, we decided to use semi-structured interview and persona to understand our users and uncover users’ needs, goals and painpoints and opportunities for our design.
Semi-structured interviews
Why interviews?
We believe that user interview is essential as it is an effective strategy used to uncover valuable information about our users.
Semi-structured interviews allows users to freely express themselves in casual dialogue while the designed interview questions that are based on our previous research provides structure of the conversations so that the conversations would have several focal points to answer our interested questions, which can be used for further analysis.
As our team is specifically designing an internal visualization tool for analyzing the ultrasound system data, we need to consult and gain perspectives from specialists with different expertise knowledge in the field.
Executive Summary
We were able to schedule four interviews with specialists from different knowledge fields, including the UX designer, the clinical product manager, the clinical engineer, and the system engineer as they’re the target user group, users of data visualization tool.
Four semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand their workflows and gain their perspectives regarding our design questions.
Based on the information we gathered, we created a codebook to articulate further what information should be prioritized through interview analysis.
Research Findings
We understand that one of the main goal of the visualization tool is for crossteam functional communication as there are several specialists involve the development and design of the ultrasound machine. Specialists include UX research and design, engineering, clinical engineering, and product management teams. Currently, they lack efficient tools for collecting and using data from their ultrasound machines.
different specialist teams have different goals and needs, our designed tool needs to satisfy needs of different goals. For example, UX team often use data for iterations, make prioritization of features and functionalities of the ultrasound machines.
We have various data types and levels of knowledge in statistics. The tool needs to consider various abilities of making sense of the data.
2. Persona
Why personas?
We were able to generalize design requirements, goals, needs, and pain-points of our users. Personas help us as designers/researchers visualize our users’ workflow, usability with current tools, and urgent needs.
Each persona will serve as a crucial guide throughout the research and design phases of this project as they will be grounded in the aggregated data from interviews.
Executive Summary
We used participatory design method with our sponser Sonosite UX researchers team as they are primary users of the tools.
We made a few iterations of our persona. At first, our personas focused on the existing problems within the company’s job responsibilities and their motivations of using this data visualization tools. However, in order to fit in larger context of the use case of the tools, we narrowed down three personas that are differed by the job responsibilities into two personas with aggregated user goals, tasks and use scenarios when interact with our systems. We finalize our personas by identifying key use cases of investigation and testing.
Our personas focus on the problems and users’ technological ability. The scenarios are more specific and tasks oriented, which aligns with the our users’ goals.
Design Process
Task Analysis
To help us understand how the solution should be designed to better support the user, we came up with user scenario cases/tasks based on the personas. With the pains, desires, and goals in mind, we went through a task analysis process to identify the objective of users when they use our solution. Performing a task analysis helped us identify what information and functions our users need and when they need it. map out the high-level user flow outline easily.
User Flow Chart
We found it very abstract and hard to show the user flow for this internal visualization tool via texts because while designing this tool, we need to consider the large amount of data with layers and layers hierarchy. Therefore, we decided to work backward which to start the wireframe first to visualize the user flow and then re-ordered the hierarchy of different functions that support the user flow.
Prototyping Process
Annotated Wireframes
Based on the ideas we have on the design phase, we started to build our wireframes based on our user flow charts. There are four key functions that we are focusing on when building our wireframes including
Sharing in team drive
Searching in parameter pages
Filtering & Slicing in parameter panel
Editing in visualization panel.
Low-fi Prototype
Using the annotated wireframe as a skeleton for our next phase, we starting building out the content and context for what our user task would be. With help from the SonoSite UX team and our previously made personas we generated a probable task that many users will likely undertake. This task formed into our low-fi prototype.
We then used our annotated low-fi prototype in our RITE usability test. These test were more formal, as they were with SonoSite teams besides the UX team.
Hi-fi Prototype
The high-fi prototype is nearly a functioning system of our solution(focus on features and functionalities), with none of the engineering behind it. Based on our low-fi prototype and the feedback we got from our usability testing, we built high-fi prototype incorporating the whole workflow of each interaction in a clean and sleek presentation.
Evaluation Process
RITE Method
Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) is a usability testing method where you evaluate a solution to a usability problem multiple times in a rapid and iterative manner. The goal is to identify not just usability problems, but also to react quickly on identified issues and test new solutions that cater to them.
We adopted RITE method to do usability testing early in the wireframes phase, with the SonoSite UX team, so that we would need less usability testing later in the project.
Cognitive Walkthrough
Cognitive walkthrough method is a usability inspection method, aiming to identify usability issues in interactive systems. It is a task-specific method where users are asked to complete tasks to evaluate the system’s usability.
We chose this method because it is a extremely cost-effective and easy to carry out usability testing method during the covid-19 situation where we could only conducted activities online.
Reflection
UX Related reflection
Early divergent design ideas testing
We spent nearly half of the time on user research as it is a very new field to us to get to know the area, which leaves us not enough time for design and usability testing. It would be great if we can have some rough design ideas early in the beginning so that we would have more options when making different design decisions.
Importance of error prevention
One thing that we did not have enough time for further iterations is the idea of error prevention, which includes designing a more intuitive way of retrieving previous resources, or saving data when making changes.
Also, during cognitive walkthrough, we realized people with different levels of technical abilities may perceive the names of the features differently and uses our features differently. We need to account for different uses, sometimes unintended, of the same features.
Balance between participants and sponsors
Our sponsors/mentors are also the main target users of our tool, which makes the collaboration fairly easy. However, during design phase, their roles become a bit unclear, sometimes their views can be overpowering to us as designers. In the future, knowing different power dynamics of the team can be important when work with others.