Situation: A mid-sized radiology company sought to differentiate themselves by redefining how clinicians interact with radiological images and reports.
Task: Create a radically improved user experience that would streamline the process of viewing all of the different data associated with a given patient.
Action: Using the insights gathered during research with clinicians and during requirements discussions with the client, I sketched out some preliminary wireframes to think through the key challenges of the application. After working with other user experience personnel to refine the wireframes and talk through workflow, I created a timeline containing the main touchpoints between clinicians and the radiological information. The initial wireframe sketches and timeline are shown below.
The timeline helped serve as a framework from which to structure the rest of the application. From the initial wireframes, I fleshed out the primary interaction concepts through collaboration with other user experience personnel to refine the layout and flow of the user experience.
Result: The result is a concept that presents data to users on a “per-patient” basis rather than on a “per-exam” basis, which is how existing systems were organized. This allows clinicians to more easily analyze patients longitudinally, which better matches real-world behavior. The final wireframes (shown below) utilize innovative interactions (such as sliding panels and hidden reveals) and were designed with the goal of someday running the application on a tablet (e.g. an iPad). One idea for shuffling between exams for a given patient was to use a “deck-of-cards” metaphor, in which users could browse different exams for a given patient by swiping to the left or right.
Tools used on this project include pen-and-paper, Microsoft Visio, and Axure RP.