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Swift Medical
Role:
UI/UX Designer + Product
Timeline:
June 2021 - September 2021
Platform:
Style Guide
Team:
2 Product Managers,
1 Technical Product Manager,
1 Clinical Advisor
Tags:
Branding/Styleguide Creation, UI/UX Design, User Interviews, Product Thinking
INTRODUCTIONS
🔐 Dear Diary
Swift Medical is a healthcare startup specializing in digital wound care management. Through the app, healthcare providers can manage their patients' wound care through clinically calibrated wound imaging on a phone/tablet.
This project will read more like a personal diary entry, rather than a case study, as most of my work is protected by an NDA.
🦈 Jumping Off the Deep End
During my freshman year of college, my best friend and I were, for lack of a better term, "gunner premeds" – we stacked our course schedule full of classes such as organic chemistry, cell biology, and physics. Outside of academics, we applied to the most prestigious premed clubs on campus, started doing clinical research at Stanford Medicine, and meticulously devised an 8-year plan to become doctors by 26 years old. By the start of our third and last quarter of freshman year, we were completely burnt out, not to mention the compounded fatigue from a completely online school year due to COVID-19.
🥀 Trials and Tribulations of a burnt out 18-year old
As someone who grew up sewing and loved fashion design, I turned to remedy my burnout through creative means – specifically through design. I designed social media posts, infographics, and even resource pamphlets for UCLA Health clinics. However I decided that I wanted to go a step further and explore UI/UX design.
I applied to Nova, Tech for Good, UCLA’s premier tech club on campus, and after making it to the last step of their recruitment process, I was rejected. Heartbroken, I asked for feedback, and the main reason cited was “lack of experience.”
🚫 Rejection is Redirection?
Determined to gain experience and turn this rejection into a future acceptance next recruitment season, I started cold emailing different startups for product design experience – luckily, Swift Medical responded.
THE PROCESS
❓The Problemspace
Due to the diverse range of different functions on the app, as well as its integration into the healthcare atmosphere, Swift Medical provides training manuals and webinars to train healthcare professionals on how to use the app. However, these training manuals and webinars were not as engaging and readable as Swift would have liked, which could lead to decreased engagement and interest in a revolutionary product.
🔎 Defining the scope
How might we redesign the Swift Medical training manuals to be more engaging?
👥 What do the users want?
When meetings with other product team members, developers, and clinicians on the vision of the training manual redesign, I devised three main goals which were to increase:
1) Readability
2) Scalability
3) Realisticness in Clinical Setting
✨ The Final Product
The final product was a style guide for training materials stored on Swift's confluence internal documentation.
While I can't show you the entirety of the style guide, here are some notes about it:
1) Playful Scribble
This captures the attention and increases readability, as it contrasted with the font of the rest of the manual. This also increase engagement with the material, as the scribbles made the process more “exciting” to learn about, rather than just another training manual
2) Step by Step Instructions on How to Recreate
In order to ensure the scalability of the style guide and design components, I also created step by step instructions on how to use Figma and parent components to apply the style guide to future training materials
REFLECTION
💭 Here's what I learned that summer:
I. The Harsh Realities of a Learning Curve
There’s a harsh learning curve when it comes to working at a real startup with full-time adults as an 18-year old that was completely new to Figma and the world of product and UI/UX design. From morning standups, design work sessions, meeting quarterly goals, internal documentation, tracking progress on Jira, and presenting designs to cross-functional teams, there was a lot to learn.
However, I’m glad I jumped into the deep end – although my wonderful PM was there to mentor me, I definitely matured a lot, from being able to ask the right questions, present designs the most effective way, and command myself in a professional setting
II. Meet with EVERY Stakeholder
Learning how to not only work on cross-functional teams, but also understand what each piece of the team – from devs, designers, product, and clinicians – brings is extremely important! The redesign of the training manual impacted every different team member, whom each had a different perspective – the devs wanted to ensure the technology they developed was being explained correctly, the product managers wanted to ensure increased engagement with the product, and the clinicians wanted to ensure the feasibility of the new updates, especially in a clinical environment. Advocating for what you gather from each interview and combining the different perspectives makes for a holistic product!
III. Design is Play!
Design is rooted in creativity, which means that you can let your wildest ideas take charge!
When I needed more wound pictures to show app functionality (and didn't have access to any wounds to use the app on), I taped an image of a wound to my leg, set the scene with my old suturing kit, and did an impromptu photo shoot in my bedroom:
💌 A Million Thanks
Special thanks to the Product team at Swift Medical for taking me under their wing and mentoring me in product design and digital healthcare design. It is because of this special internship that I have solidified my passion for the intersection of design, tech, and healthcare to increase human-centered and quality care!
Sincerely,
Whitney
P.S. also got accepted into Nova, Tech for Good :)
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