IBM Watson Discovery Center
What is IBM Watson Discovery Center?
Our sponsor for this prototype was the American Diabetes Association. The ADA approached us with the challenge of using Watson with a search engine to parse, not just their own databases, but others as well. They wanted to create one gateway with a smooth, customizable user experience. The proposed search engine would crawl not only ADA and PubMed, but Medline, multiple journals, Dynamed and Clinicaltrials.gov.
The problem statement
When it comes to medical research, the ability to find specifics can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is the case for both providers (physicians) and patients or the caregivers of patients. The physician, for example, is often trying to find a common thread around specific terms regarding genetic information, therapies and patient characteristics. Often the physician or patient isn’t sure exactly what she’s looking for, but fishing for a common thread that could solve a problem. On top of all that, there are multiple databases containing the same types of information. Which one to search first? Physicians often turn to a database called PubMed, but PubMed can be very cumbersome. Patients and caregivers, on the other hand, have the entire internet to wade through, often turning to Google or WebMD.
My role and business objective
Traveling to Washington DC to meet with the ADA and hosting them here in Raleigh provided me with a wealth of information. Our contacts at the ADA had been with the organization for many years and understood the current systems as well as the abilities of Watson. My job was to understand the user needs of the providers when researching specific topics. How do they prefer to visualize the data? What is the best way Watson can return search results that make it easy for the user to digest and understand at a glance? My role was to create a UI that would simplify and streamline medical research.
The key users and how they were identified
Luckily, our sponsors at the ADA were also writers and researchers. Not just about diabetes but cancer and other diseases as well. They were well versed in PubMed and could supply pain points for why it wasn’t useful. They provided me with a wish list of the desired user experience and came to the table with many ideas.
How I practiced Design Thinking
Using Design Thinking I worked with our users to isolate the following pain points of their as-is scenario and gather appropriate needs statements:
The actions I took
The team at the ADA worked with us through several iterations of the design. After each review, I would make tweaks to satisfy their needs and suggestions. Due to the short runway for development, some of the design iterations happened in tandem with development work. This is a common occurrence with tight deadlines. We needed a prototype to demo at a national yearly conference. Working closely with the development lead, I attended their weekly scrums to ensure the UI was being developed as designed.
What artifacts I created and the key principles I applied
Typically, I do like to create interactive prototypes for user testing. Considering we had multiple meetings with the ADA every week, I decided to maintain the designs in Illustrator (before I started using Sketch), and show the interactivity with a Keynote file.
Once we were ready to start development, I delivered vector assets to the dev team with spec sheets for color and layout. Red lines were delivered to illustrate the layout down to the pixel.