Medidata is a tech company that creates software to run clinical trials. They boast an array of different products in what they call their Clinical Cloud, with the purpose of being able to move in and out of these apps within a single sing-on, and within the same trial. That sounds easy enough, until each trial could have hundreds of people working on it.
Each app had its user base and permissions, which quickly became a nightmare for companies to set up, the more it relied on Medidata to run its trials. Companies wanted one central place to onboard their users, and control what permissions they had.
With 12 major products and over 70 roles, research and interviews was essential. I needed to not only get information from every product manager at Medidata, but also interview their SMEs, client stakeholders, and potential end users of this product. More than any product I had ever designed, the key was understanding the common technicalities each company had, as well as handling their differences.
Beyond the complexities and technical nature of this project, it became fun. When you're working on a project that seems technical and bland in nature, so also might be inherent workflow and process. With that comes opportunity to use good UX to create work shortcuts for the user. This gave them huge value they didn't expect.
Surprisingly, the reactions in user testing often times was about what I'm used to. To people whose jobs are spent mostly in spreadsheets, shortcuts are a big deal.
We were able to cut down their workflow by 43%, which was not a measure we expected. For big phrama, that's an estimated average savings of $70,000 per trial.
