Doctors and Designers

This is a conversation between Padmaja and Chitra from Adeptic Creative Labs about Padmaja’s unique experience working with a whole of different kinds of stakeholders in the healthcare industry and her experiences working on a UX project amidst doctors and designers. Project started in 2019, a collaboration consortium in the cardiology space for an in procedure product She took on a UX program manager role, along with 2 designers and other important members in the team. A 3 year project. The huge learning curve in doing Ethnography studies, user research, talking to doctors, super specialization within cardiac science and combination of physics. Going to hospitals in the US and in India, observing doctors, observing animal trials Interviewed doctors and technicians, doing a follow-me-home study Being deferential is key to stay in the conversation, MD's and PhD's, world's best - asking them to teach the team. Challenge was working at their level, learning cardiology 1-0-1, and attending midnight classes with a lot of reading up. A very kind and accommodating environment. Be open about not understanding, people have to be given the time, immersion of sorts, a guru-shishya parampara. Team setup - Engineering team - relying on UI specs, stories, strong backend engineers paved the way for success. Recruited people from across the world - Armenia, Peru, France, Russia with a need to work in stealth mode Anonymising user specs, cardio to geo spatial Team collaboration - in-person travel, until Covid hit, and then remote working, daily scrum calls, intensive spec writing, mockups and prototypes Clinicians responded better to high fidelity prototypes and mock walkthroughs with engineering teams Becoming closer as a team, staring at each other over a zoom call in all meetings. High fidelity prototypes v/s wireframes - a flip Challenges with legends, Mimicking what's there in the real world, showing new experiences, no interference in garden variety features needed to stay the same Having doctors in the core team, who made time, the clinical rep who spoke for the team was fully engaged Lessons for UX folks from this experience. This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital. Write to us at [email protected]. Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.