System for documenting a patient’s journey through surgery

Encares software is aimed at hospitals to use in a surgery process. Medical staff can document data regarding the patient. This is manual work, they enter data into the application. Then they can review statistics around this in infographics or just plain data. In the data review section, they wanted the ability to fold and unfold sections of infographic elements. Which we gave them a solution for. After that, they wanted us to redesign the whole system.

Challenging work

We were two UX designers in this project. For the first small assignment, we made a fast proposal based on best practices and input from their medical specialists. It turned out well and then they wanted us to do an audit of the whole software.

We made our evaluation, pointing out problems and areas of improvement. After that, we were given the green light to start work on an improved design for the software. We then had insightful interviews with experts from the company. Their in-house developers were also discussed with, so we knew the possibilities and boundaries that existed.

We had to learn the whole journey the patient and the medical staff could have in a surgery process. These insights were provided by Encare experts who were former doctors.

It was indeed a very complex system and we understood why users could have trouble understanding how it worked. They have over 400,000 filter options.

An immense challenge was ahead of us. Section by section we remade the designs into more user-friendly interfaces. This was a desktop solution only since this is not meant to be used on a mobile. Adaptations were made for three different desktop resolutions. We constantly iterated improvements and ideas with project owners, experts, and developers. We also did our best to stay WCAG compliant.

Medical complexity

It was complex and took a lot of thinking, discussion, and creativity. With my first UX partner, I had an ok teamwork. That person was exchanged for another and we had a smoother teamwork. My first partner talked a lot and was not good at listening, the second partner was much better at that. I don’t think I have ever worked on a more complex solution. Especially their filter solution was very complicated. Good experience to take with me.

I think AI can have a big impact on this company and their product. It would be much easier to have a simple prompt to be able to display desired information than having to deal with their complex filter. It could be wise to incorporate that into this.

This was also another example of that remote working works fine. We all worked from different places in the country.