My Responsibilities: Problem space identification, creating user interview guide, creating interactive app prototype, competitive landscape research

Deliverables: Process map, journey map, Figma prototype, business plan, pitch deck

As part of a two-quarter long medical entrepreneurship class, I was a member of an interdisciplinary team of students from Northwestern’s graduate schools. We identified stakeholder needs across a wide variety of problem spaces, and developed a solution which we pitched to investors. We are now in the process of applying to a variety of entrepreneurship competitions to secure funding to begin development of a beta version of our app to use in clinical trials.

Problem Space Identification

Each team member spoke with medical professionals to source initial ideas. We conducted market research and literature reviews of potential problem spaces. After extensive conversation, we narrowed down our list to four promising ideas.

After interviewing industry experts including insurance executives, clinicians, and medical startup entrepreneurs, we mapped our ideas in a matrix and compared across key metrics of success for our project. We decided to focus on creating a home-based cardiac rehab service.

Problem Space Exploration

After focusing on home based cardiac rehab, we began exploring the problem space by researching existing options in industry and speaking with cardiologists to understand the existing care models. We created

Preliminary Prototypes

After synthesizing what we learned from this problem space exploration, we created a preliminary prototype of what our service could look like. We created a patient journey map depicting the interaction between the patients and the service.

We then created a storyboard to give more emotion to these interactions, to be used as a reference when interviewing stakeholders to give them a good sense of what our service might look like.

Stakeholder Interviews

We conducted over 30 in depth stakeholder interviews with eligible patients (both those who enrolled and completed CR and those who never enrolled), cardiologists and other relevant clinicians, and insurance providers. The purpose of these interviews was to gain insight into the reasons for lack of enrollment in cardiac rehab, and gauge interest in our service.

Minimum Viable Prototype

We began creating a minimum viable prototype (MVP) of the patient facing application aspect of our service and developed a business model and financial forecasting. We presented the MVP and business model to  industry experts to assess its viability and identify areas for improvement.

As the only designer on the team I managed the creation of MVP. I created an app network map, wireframed each screen, created a design system, taught teammates how to use Figma to prototype apps, created the majority of the MVP), and ensured a unified UX system. See below for app network map.

After deciding which screens we were creating for the MVP, created a wireframe reference document for my teammates who were helping with the MVP. This document had a rough sketch wireframe of each screen.

From there, we began creating a clickable prototype in Figma. I had to adjust my UX design process to allow for collaboration between team members with very limited design experience, meaning this was a valuable exercise in project management. Ultimately collaborating with team members might have led to more work for myself (I ended up needing to heavily revise or at times entirely recreate the majority of the pages they made) but it was a rewarding and educational experience for my teammates.