A pharmaceutical manufacturer was developing an updated version of an existing, in-market system to help patients with medication adherence. As a connected medical system, both the existing product and new product had an accompanying mobile application.
Evaluate connected medical system usability and integration
Challenge
The manufacturer makes continuous improvements to the existing mobile app, while also designing the next generation of the product. These two streams of research (improving the existing app and designing the new system) eventually intersect during the release of the new product.
Approach
Throughout this research, the goals were to evaluate the new system for safety, effectiveness, and unforeseen use risks, think through touchpoints and pain points of updated releases to ensure this is accounted for in the new system, consider alternate designs to make both versions of the system more usable and understood, and bridge patients to the new app (training, integration).
To reach this specialized patient population, we tested in multiple locations across the country, both in English- and Spanish-speaking in-lab sessions. We also utilized our on-staff RN to advise on considerations during testing for this protected patient population to ensure we approached testing scenarios and environments in a way that participants will understand and respond to. One part of the research required clinician-assisted training to simulate real-world training of the system.
Outcome
Our research for the next-generation system resulted in our team providing recommendations to ensure there is a seamless set-up process that prompt less questions and fears of using the system, less outreach to call centers, and to drive accompanying mobile app use.
We also provided design recommendations for system packaging that included improved imagery, layout, terminology, sentence structure, labeling, and fonts.