Insight

Company: Strata Oncology
My Role: User Experience Designer II — Full-time Employee

The Basics_

Our project team included 2 product manager, 2 developers, 1 bioinformatician, and 1 designer (that’s me) under the supervision of our Chief Data Scientist. The initial launch of our four month project was originally scheduled for end of September 2022.

However, this project was deprioritized by our Product Steering team and was disbanded shortly before our planned launch.

Goal of Concept_

The intention of Insight is to bring the most updated information to any patient that received our testing. As part of Strata’s testing, the report shares a collection of clinical trials available to the patient based on their biomarker results. Cancer care is constantly improving, therefore, the list of clinical trials and therapy recommendations for a patient are too.

With Insight, a dynamic report would share this information for each patient that received testing through Strata. Anytime a new trial became available. The associated physician would be notified, and the patient’s report data would be updated.

Design_

Due to the dynamic nature of this report, we needed a web-based reporting system. This was a natural inclusion to the One Portal design that Strata launched earlier in the year.

The design of this product would need to include and exclude subsections based on the testing ordered for the patient. While other sections maintained their presence regardless of the requested tests. I was tasked to solve this problem. I needed to think critically to develop a design that displayed only the necessary sections, while also maintaining visual consistency and respecting spacial recognition.

There’s an infinite number of different test result outputs that the NGS test would report.

I also incorporated additional UI elements into the design to ensure our web based reporting UI would include all of the existing elements of our printed report and more.

Another component of this project was the need for this to be accessible to a physician through their own electronic health record, in other words, it needed to function as a printed report also. Once I had a firm grasp on the design for the web UI, I began to implement the design elements into a print view.

Retro_

Due to the company’s choice to reorganize prioritization, this project was put on hold until we reached launch for several other products. One thing that this pause in product development allowed was for the team to take a step back from our progress so far, see what was working and what we needed to change.

This practice alone was incredibly helpful. I would highly recommend to incorporate retrospective thinking into the project plan not just at the end of the project but during. This way, we’re solving more problems as they arise, rather than letting the dust settle before investing in a broom.