Clinical Trial Finder
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s Clinical Trial Finder is an online resource that allows pancreatic cancer patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals to search for potentially life-saving treatment options by using diagnosis and treatment details to match patients with clinical trials.
Role
I was the product designer and functional lead on a team consisting of a project manager, UX researcher, UX designer and developer. The work was created while at Springbox from 2015 to 2017.
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The trial finder was originally built by a legacy team, and various issues were creating friction for users interacting with the tool. We addressed those issues by establishing a consistent system of UI patterns, revising the navigation structure to improve user flow and comprehension, reframing the use cases of the tool in order to better indicate functionality and enhancing the tool’s primary search features. The team conducted user research and planned a product roadmap to inform these enhancements.
Clinical Trial Finder Homepage – Users are asked to identify as a way of navigating to distinct experiences within the tool.
Detail of notification system established for pattern library.
Establishing a pattern library
The tool was originally built without much consistency in the style of UI elements and content. By establishing usage rules and streamlining the number of styles implemented, we were able to create a more cohesive experience.
We documented using a cloud-based style guide manager called Frontify, which allowed us to capture patterns in code, reflecting how they behaved in different states and responsively. This work helped to inform future enhancements to the tool and improve existing features.
PATTERNS FIRST
While I enjoyed the process of refining the patterns for an existing system, I walked away with a strong sense the value of a strategic approach to the design system from the beginning of a project. And while Frontify was a great tool to explore, its limitations and the separate workstream to keep it up-to-date ultimately outweighed the value of the tool.
Enhancing trial search
During beta testing, we realized the faceted search geared toward healthcare professionals needed additional iteration. Users were unsure how to apply a filter, as they had to press a submit button after making each selection. And once selected, the tool did not clearly indicate what filters were applied.
Along with a UX designer and developer on the project, we redesigned the user flow and layout of the trial search process, building an Axure prototype to validate suggested enhancements. Some of the primary changes included revising filters to apply automatically once selected, displaying the applied filters as chips above the search results and improving the information architecture of the page to improve legibility. We also refined the use of color, reserving green to communicate elements that held a relationship to the applied filters.
BEFORE: User were unclear about how to submit a filter and what filters had been previously selected.
AFTER: We enhanced the trial search by using Ajax loading to submit selections automatically and by displaying selected filters above the search results.
Clinical Trial Finder Takeaways
This project was a lesson in baby steps. The platform had launched about a year before I came onto the project, and thus the client didn’t want to spend a fortune making enhancements. We were lucky to be able to invest time in making the tool more functional, but we didn’t achieve every aspiration we had.
It was also a lesson in the power of collaboration and the good things that a team can do when they work with a purpose. Rallying around such a wonderful organization pushed us harder to find solutions that were empathetic, responsible and served the user along every step of the journey.