UX design and strategy for database navigation tool
Jack Glacken
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Posted Jan 16, 2025
A strategic UX case study for a Medical Database Navigator for solution architects to quickly test data flow. From user research and product discovery to desig…
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Our team were hampered by a lack of internal tooling. We designed a frontend database navigator, which enabled our whole team to achieve diverse, positive business outcomes.
Overview
Time frame. 3 months to MVP development
Team. M’self, Product Owner and 2 developers, reporting to senior product managers
Platform. Desktop webapp, built over an “EHRbase” OpenEHR database
Industry. Medical informatics
Main tasks. Product discovery, research, requirements prioritisation, user experience and user interface design. Collaboration with agile team for development
A frontend UI for backend engineers and solution architects
Vitagroup focuses on creating structured data in their Clinical Data Repository (CDR). As we gained our first customers, Solution Architects in vitagroup were gaining experience in installing CDRs, but were hampered by poor tooling.
The CDR is a black box
The CDR was a backend tool, a "black box" which didn't yet have a frontend for interacting with the data. We needed to enable our team to interact with the database in an easy way.
Discovering the problem space with user interviews and expert interviews
With a small team and short timeline, we needed to make sure we found the most impactful features. Interviewing our expert internal users, the pain of finding data with off-the-shelf API tools was palpable and offered us a strong direction for the product.
Helping the development team and management see an agile path forward.
As we looked at development team capacity, the scope was cut and cut again. So, I worked with the PM and my more senior design colleague bouncing ideas to pare down the feature set into increments that would deliver value and validate the hypothesis of time saved.
When I presented the pared down version to our stretched-too-thin team again, and the developers started saying “Oh, that would be pretty easy.” Not long after, we got the buy-in from the product owner and got our V1 onto the roadmap.
Early success: MVP adoption gave us a mandate to keep building
The implementation was very basic, but the MVP was well received by a variety of team members, who benefitted from the ease of accessing data.
This also immediately highlighted the need for further development. We were able to continue with an agile approach, getting features on the roadmap to provide the usability we needed to deliver greater value.
In an ongoing process, collaborating with our expert users and our team, we started designing and implementing features that brought the interface beyond the MVP stage into being a central part of the product.
Pre-populated dropdown menu
A dropdown menu was added that would pre-populate with all available templates. This allowed users much greater visibility of what terms they could search for.
Copy and download data
Further features like pagination, copying cell values, tooltips all added to a more complete user experience, making the CDR Explorer less of an after-thought and more of key feature in the HIP CDR frontend.
The visibility of data helped our sales team sell 6-figure contracts
Making data generally more visible and accessible helped our sales process too. The CDR Explorer was used extensively in system demonstrations that helped customers see the cleverness and necessity of the HIP CDR.
This in turn helped us to win several 6-figure sales contracts across Europe, to serve millions of people with our core product. For the HIP CDR, these were our first customers, and it was the beginning of gaining traction for the company and the underlying OpenEHR technology.
Review
I loved working on this product, and I continue to design products in a similar way, where I use research and product discovery techniques to uncover needs. Other projects I worked on during this time were less successful because of less understanding of users, which gives me resolve in insisting in my work that we make a strong connection to the people we serve.