Designing quality for life sciences

Or how to juggle like a pro.

Introduction

In 2023 I’ve been working on a SaaS that fulfils the quality needs of companies in the life sciences industry (pharma, medical devices, food processing, biotechnology…).

The company had no UX process in place when I joined. No UX process at all. This means no research, no analytics, no user flows, no content style-guide, no testing to validate designs.

Additionally, like in many other young start-ups, a mistake was made from the very beginning: to develop each and every feature request that came from customers, quickly creating a maze of disconnected functionalities.

On top of that, the company is undergoing a major transformation from PHP to Golang and Vue.js, which means all dev effort is invested in this rewriting all existing functionality and no improvements will be made to the current platform until this massive refactor is done. Luckily, Pendo is a great tool to smooth those usability gaps in the meantime.

And of course, while implanting a UX process and putting out fires, all existing functionality needs to be documented, analysed and redesigned to avoid past mistakes.

Main tasks

• Implementation & documentation of a UX process: so far, the company was limiting the impact of the UX team to UI design only, so I defined, with the support of the VP of Product, a more appropriate process to include research, content design, interaction design, and more, to the process. Following the industry requirements, I elaborate many procedures, instructions and templates for the team to use, like discussion guide templates, guides on how to conduct research, confidentiality agreements, and so on. I’ve also defined a content style guide and a review & translations process — the platform was originally built by developers who had English as a second language, and then automatically translated to other 4 languages, making the copy very confusing for non-English-speakers, so I’ve defined (and documented) a content review & translations process with the help of native translators.

Slide of the “Content Good & Bad Practices” manual deck.

• User research: from user interviews and usability testing to usage analytics, personas and flow definition, I train the product team in user research best practices to change the way decisions are taken in the company, going from 0 to 8 usability testing (documented) sessions per month in six months! 😎

I’ve met so many nice, smart people!

• Analytics: I’ve configured Pendo, tagging pages and features and exporting data on paths and funnels to understand user behaviour better. I also export data from Google Analytics to help the product and marketing teams make better decisions. And, of course, I document all these processes and results.

From raw data (left) to useful insights (middle and right).

• Flows & information architecture: as part of a transition from PHP to Golang, all business logics have to be replicated, which means they have to be understood, analysed, documented, and improved (when possible).

Flow that a document follows from creation to publication in life sciences.

• Help guides & resource center: with Pendo, HTML, CSS and JS, I’ve built a resource center and many help guides in points of friction. This way users had the available documentation at hand whenever needed, and open less support tickets. Templates and segmentations are reusable so they’re easy to maintain.

Examples of Pendo guides (left) and the resource center I’ve built using basic front-end languages (right).

• Visual design: after extracting insights from user research and analytics, I create mockups in Figma to test the improvements before development. I collaborate with the product team using Figma comments and Slack. Decisions are documented in Jira tasks.

Some mockups on Figma, using PrimeVue components.

Biggest challenges

Document, document, document!

In the world of life sciences, audits happen often. In order to pass them, all your processes need to be documented and understood by everyone. This makes sense, but also takes up a lot of time. The greatest challenge though, is not to write the process down, but to make people follow it!

Semantically, waterfalls are agile

Very often, the concept of Agile gets mistaken by “fast”. However, Agile is a cycle with cross-functional teams, collaboration and iteration, not a chain of production in a straight line. If you understand the difference, your product & team will thrive.

Transition from PHP to Golang

The development team is growing fast to support this technology switch. This, along with training the former employees in a new technology, can have unpredictable consequences.

What I learned from this project

• How quickly a young product can become overwhelming if you implement every customer request.
• ChatGPT can’t design for usability, but can help a lot with repetitive tasks.
• I love front-end programming and learning new things.
• I can, indeed, multitask.