Roche hired our studio to lead the design of their health recommendations platform, serving doctors and patients. We crafted an intuitive interface that seamlessly translates complex health data from multiple sources into an intuitive interface that offers real-time insights and health decision support. Our solution helps doctors and patients think more holistically and long-term, while also providing support for day-to-day health challenges.

When we began working with Roche, work was already in progress for a doctor-focused application that would improve clinical decision making. The team had gone through several iterations of their MVP, but nothing had been built yet. We quickly understood that though there were some good ideas, a holistic strategy wasn’t yet in place, and the prototype didn’t have a clear identity. The discovery research Roche had done was limited, which made it harder to understand some of their decisions. While we all wanted to move quickly, it was vital to step back and align on which problem we were trying to solve, as well as our philosophy of approach. We emphasized the need for a realignment since they were facing many issues.

❌ There wasn't a clear product identity or vision.

⏳ Considerable time and resources had already been spent.

🔻 The product wasn't making any money.

🤯 Key stakeholders weren't aligned on a strategy.

We started our work by immersing ourselves in what the Roche team had already learned. We discovered that there were various reports available, scattered across hundreds of files. We read, analyzed, and summarized the data in a format that made the findings more visible and allowed us to extract clear insights. We also conducted additional discovery research in areas where there wasn't enough clarity on our target audience’s journeys and needs. Roche had identified doctors and patients as the two key personas. The research indicated that clinical decision support was an unmet need for physicians, but due to doctors’ busy schedules, any new tool that added operational overhead would be challenging to adopt. At the same time, our research with patients also showed promise, but the diverse needs that we discovered ensured that crafting a product wouldn’t be easy.

In addition to our research findings, we considered current health trends to set the product strategy. We saw a rising interest in holistic health that is still underserved. Doctors often don’t have enough time with patients to look at disease prevention or early diagnosis, and patients are often under-informed about how to manage their health long term. Our niche became clear, and we opted to bet on holistic health for both the doctor and patient-facing sides of our app.

With this direction in mind, we eventually landed on a product concept to provide medical and health recommendations to doctors and patients. We zeroed in on chronic health as a good first target area. If done right, such recommendations could prove immensely helpful to both of our target audiences. If we could help shed light on risk factors and signs that were less noticeable, we could provide a real benefit to people’s health.

There were several key objectives we considered as we crafted our strategy:

Our design aimed to serve our users with care and make a positive difference in their health. As we were focusing on both doctors and patients, we designed two different solutions that provided insights and recommendations, but did so in a way that fit the different personas’ point of view, medical education, and context.

To test the effectiveness of our designs, our team and Roche focused on concept validations. In those sessions, we showed mid to high-fidelity prototypes to users, including both doctors and patients. We asked them to talk us through what they thought and how they understood each screen. We also asked them how they would achieve a certain task using the UI to see if their understanding matched with our intended design.

These sessions gave us insight into the effectiveness of our designs, as well as opportunities for iteration and improvements. We tested the limits of our designs by considering edge cases, extreme data conditions, and different participant profiles. This helped us ensure our research data would be as close as possible to real-life usage in routine.

Our research and validation helped us navigate the complex domain of healthcare and deliver quality designs tailored for doctors and patients. Our work was received very positively from both of our target audiences, and we are confident it will help simplify and improve decision-making for immediate care as well as long-term health. Our time at Roche yielded not only the delivery of the products, but also impacted their team dynamics. Through working together, we transformed their process, the role of designers in the team, and the overall philosophy and strategy of the group that we were a part of. Here are some of the comments from the team’s design manager: