Designing a product that reduces the time to identify the effectiveness of antidepressants.
Focus: Service Design, User Research, User Interface Design
P1vital® PReDicT is a breakthrough digital product that can detect whether an antidepressant treatment is effective within 7 days instead of 4-6 weeks. The team behind it are a spin-out from Oxford University.
The product is intended to significantly improve patient outcomes, reduce healthcare costs and the wider costs to the economy of depression. P1vital approached PDR to ensure their product met the needs of patients and healthcare professionals, was usable and communicated results clearly.
I worked within a team of two as UI and usability lead on the project, with my manager acting as main client contact and project manager.
Informed Design
As a Class I medical device P1vital had more considerations for their system design than a consumer offering. Research with P1vital staff and GPs allowed us to uncover how different stakeholders would need to engage with the system. The difference between GP's expectations Vs what the client had assumed was stark, leading to another user group of practice admins required.
These design requirements informed wireframes, site architecture and visual design developed in open dialogue with the client. These were then combined to create an initial interactive browser-based prototype of the system, built in Axure.
Tested with patients
I built a high-fidelity version of the prototype, incorporating password validation and complex display logic to enable realistic scenarios of use to be simulated. This allowed a formative usability study with the intended patient population. We recruited participants spanning a large age range, with a variation in digital literacy, all with experience of depression. As a medical device, ensuring that the participants understood and navigated the system as intended was a top priority.
I planned and moderated the usability sessions with a colleague observing. Throughout the sessions we collected observational data on task completion, ad-hoc feedback from participants, perceived usability feedback on each task through survey and a final System usability scale score. This mix of data collection was used because of the medical device status of the design, allowing results to be recorded in design history files for the client.
