Desktop product, only accessible for Windows, tons of screens, exotic medical jargon - it was hard to step any meaningful in the direction of understanding what this product is anyway and how can we support Labtech to develop a better one.

Through comprehensive stakeholder interviews, hours of in-depth conversations with experts, a thorough examination of the current software, a detailed analysis of the customer success team's records, a study of flagship competitor tools, and our curious deep dive into the ECG domain, after approximately 30+ hours of interviews and workshops, we have formed a clear understanding of the scope of the task and its key priorities.

During the scope definition phase, it became clear that due to the nature of the medical field, the client can only engage with the customer through resellers, making both sales and communication highly indirect.

Therefore, the initial interviews, where we bypassed these indirect channels and spoke directly with healthcare professionals who use this product daily within their own environments, employing their own methods and resources, brought many surprises to everyone involved.

As it turned out, users can develop different practices for ECG evaluation depending on the country, or even the institution. They have very limited time to master or further develop these practices, and it is generally unpredictable how well-equipped they are in terms of hardware.

During the define phase, we identified the key personas and the most important product capabilities with the deep involvement of the client. With a mixture of an insight bank and a design roadmap, we prioritized most of the findings at the same time we realized that the classic methodologies centering systematic iterations as a spine of the development process, simply won’t be as effective as the human-centered design philosophy evangelizes it.

So that to manifest a tangible vision of how this software could look, operate, and create value for the cardiology industry, we designed a limited prototype to demonstrate the design process, the mindset - the way how insights become pixels.

Through creating and testing this prototype, we gained sufficent involvement, a proper understanding of the scope, we indetified technoligical and user-related problems with strategic complexity at the same time we outlined some future-proof solutions as well.

After the owners placed their trust in a complete redesign, we began the process within a more stable design framework. Before started developing the design system, we also addressed the value proposition and the brand values and corporate identity that communicate it.

Beyond the project's size and complexity, we also faced the challenge of recruiting healthcare professionals to validate product development concepts, conducting discovery interviews, or even usability testing, which proved to be extremely difficult.

Of course, this product couldn't be designed linearly instead during the design-heavy parts we systematically focused on problem areas such as data visualization, type of interactions, tutorial system, patient data management, or printing summaries.

At the same time, while lots of the interactions should be tangible to be tested we had to synchronize the second tier of the design process with an external frontend design team to understand the potential technical limitations and to ship the best solutions for data manipulation and rendering.

To reach this co-creation state between the two parts of this development team I had to convince both the agency and the client side to shift to a project approach that was unfamiliar to both parties until now.