Traditionally, managing clinical inventory has been such a dry process, that translating it to the digital world was a challenge…so much so that the client’s first objective was create something that their supply managers would actually use, as all previous attempts were so much as ignored, which led to poor reporting and cost estimates. Approaching it differently meant actually going down to the shipping facilities, asking questions and testing the product. The end result was an easy yet robust mobile app that the managers could carry around with them and use, improving cost estimates by 27% in just the first quarter.
Typically when conducting user research, I try to keep the number as small as I can, while still trying to cast a wide net as far as the type of users that would be using the product. Clinipan’s user base could be very different from each other. Some were very small and operated a calculated way, while other were vast pharmaceutical companies with large numbers of inventory. By covering a large number during the initial user research phase, we were able to find commonalties even within these large differences, and concentrate on those when ideating the core concepts of our design.
With those commonalties in mind, we used that to drive one major user direction across the different user journeys, which allowed us to create a surprisingly simplistic workflow, despite the complexities that were natural to their world. This meant by spending more time in user research, we were able to cut the estimated design time and user testing almost in half, even though the user acceptance rating in user testing was one of the higher rates I had ever personally gotten from my own user testing.
