Company: GE HealthCare
Roles in the project: Se. Lead UX Designer, Usability Engineer

From 2017 to 2021, I spearheaded the UX & usability efforts for a pivotal project at GE HealthCare, the new product implementation project for a perinatal surveillance product. I cannot divulge too much about this product due to its unreleased status and the strict non-disclosure agreement I operated under. However, I can provide some insights into the process we followed to develop this product.

The design process flowed from early concept development to validating those with customers and then creating final design guidance for the Scrum teams. Since we are talking about a product wiclassified as a medical device, usability efforts had to comply with the MDR regulations ande carried out along the development process. We would schedule formative testing sessions along the program to ensure we had enough confidence on the usability before we finally moved to the summative testing towards the end of the program. Excellent usability of medical devices is critical since even small errors can produce a hazardous risk where patient lives are endangered.

Our team was spread across three continents—Asia, North America, and Europe—and included several Scrum teams, clinicians, risk management professionals, architects, and designers, among other roles involved in the process. In addition to the everyday challenges of new product implementation, we had to work through a few hurdles to ensure high-quality development output and make new teams work smoothly together. From a design task point of view, this meant creating shared workflows for design and development to ensure the usability and delightfulness of the developed product.

I thoroughly enjoyed working with global teams and building a product that has the potential to save lives of mothers and babies alike. Like said, I unfortunately cannot share details of the product until it’s released. But I’m happy to hop on a call whenever to discuss the process and anything else not protected by the nda.

P.S. The perinatal surveillance product shown on the thumbnail is another GE HealthCare product called Connect, designed by the amazing Chris Janicki.