UX Design for MedTech Startup.

@Shalinikaushal_|December 2, 2021 (3y ago)52 views

“Working in Med-tech is rewarding and fulfilling. Knowing that my work is helping people at the most difficult times of their lives, drives me to my best.”

As I joined Tricog Health a MedTech startup, I realized that good UX has a big impact on the success of MedTech products. But, in the MedTech industry, UX has not yet had a big impact. The MedTech industry has a limited tolerance for change, as its scientific, technical, and privacy components limit how data is handled and the insights and recommendations it can offer.

An honor to work on products that save lives and help patients during the most difficult times. I work in sensitive domains, which are comparatively slow, regulated, and involve all the legacy and integration baggage you might imagine. While these specialized domains have many challenges, there are also many opportunities. I discussed design challenges and opportunities in this article.

Design Empathy For Users

I didn’t always work in the med-tech industry. Before I was working with non-medical startups. So my journey to becoming a digital health designer has been a real eye-opener. One of them is that here I can’t move fast and break things. Especially when the product I am building has a great impact on the life and death of the patients. It is a space with high sensitivity, I need to be careful with privacy, ethics, and laws to conduct research.

UX mistakes have far more damaging consequences in healthcare than in other sectors. For example; a few days back I was trying to log on to a certain website. I had the wrong password, but each time I use the new password, I get 403: Forbidden Error. My experience with this website has been so bad that I choose to never use that website again. But what if this had been a healthcare product? The patient might have been dead while we tried to figure out what we could do. We can’t apply many approaches and techniques. This is what it means in the journey of launching a healthcare product.

Human-Centered Design

It is crucial to try to understand people as well as UX methods in med-tech so that one can make a good product.

Interview physicians and observe operating devices to learn how users use the product. This helped me to make better decisions about how I should approach the design. I also noticed some importance that doctors have a very short time, and they focused. To maintain that I need to establish a level of trust between them and the product. If I hadn’t acquired the depth of product knowledge that I did, I wouldn’t have had that.