Galaxy is a surgical robot that allows for more accurate and less invasive lung cancer biopsies. It was the platform that I worked during my time at Noah Medical.
The images are zoomed out or using placeholder examples due to confidentiality reasons.
After a year in the market, it was clear that Galaxy had some usability issues. However, it was not clear to the leadership what was causing them and what they should prioritize.
Gather and analyze internal and external data to define the major areas of improvement for usability. Create project proposals to resolve the major issues, and define their priorities.
We identified main themes to focus on and created several projects that became Jira initiatives. They were used to refine long-term planning for Galaxy and to help guide new development projects.
We wanted to go broad, making sure we were listening to users and also taking a hard look in the platform ourselves. Therefore, we performed user interviews, did case observations, performed heuristic analysis, reviewed complaints, gathered clinical engineering proposals, created a competitor analysis, and collected past formative comments.
We interviewed doctors and did case observations to understand pain points in their use of Galaxy.
I performed heuristic and competitor analysis to identify UX issues and see where other systems outperformed us.
We collected data from formative evaluations, complaints, and clinical improvement proposals to make use of internal expertise.
I recorded each data point in a Figjam page, with a card structure that I created. It included the source, date (if relevant), comment, and type of finding (added after analysis). The page contained nearly 1000 data points.
This was the longest part of the project, given that we had nearly 1000 data points.
I started by grouping similar points in each data source, and then writing a title for the group. Once each source was grouped, I compared the groups among sources and merged them if possible.
I kept on distilling the major findings into insights, with the help from the team, to arrive at the core usability issues of Galaxy. After many iterations, we arrived at 4 overarching themes for improvement.
The next step was to map each data point, now categorized based on the theme, to a workflow area. This helped us see clusters of issues and define priority projects.
We presented the project to leadership and it was very well received. Some themes and projects matched hunches they had, but there were some surprises.
The projects that we drafted became Jira initiatives and I created epics for the next releases. The major themes became design goals and were often used in design review discussions or triage meetings to define next steps.
