An Engineer’s Guide to User-Centered Medical Device Design
This guide is a set of cards for Mechanical R&D Engineers outlining common practices of user-centered medical device design.
Project Introduction
Timeline
March 1-7, 2023
Tools
Figma
Project Type
Master’s Course UX Project
Background
Although the field of UX is making an impact in various industries, in my personal experience, MedTech has been slow to adopt user-centered design practices, if at all. Some MedTech companies may hire a single UI/UX Designer to work on only software products. Others may have Human Factors Engineers, but with limited bandwidth for all development projects. The companies I worked for had employees in the marketing and quality engineering departments conduct much of the user research, leaving R&D out of the process. There are some books on the topic (like this one). But I’ve noticed, throughout the MedTech industry, there’s a huge knowledge gap in user-centered design.
Context & Scope
When I worked as an R&D Engineer for two large medical device companies, I had the privilege of serving as a subject matter expert on human factors in medical device design. The purpose of this class project was to package a design method of which I am familiar into a artifact. Inspired by IDEO Method Cards, I created a set of cards for R&D Engineers outlining basic principles and practices of user-centered medical device design.
Final Prototype
The goal of this card set is to provide MedTech R&D Engineers a reference guide for user centered design, such that they can easily implement UCD in their own workflows.
Check out my cards below or click here.
Next Steps, Challenges, & Learnings
Future Enhancements
✱ Improve the visual design
I designed these cards very early in my UX education, and the visual design is just okay. I would definitely change things up to make these cards more visually appealing.
✱ Hand them out!
If given the chance, I’d love to print out these cards and hand them out to medical device engineering design teams, like the ones I used to work for!
Challenges & Learnings
✱ Making things concise
Although I have a lot of background knowledge in medical device design and human factors, it was certainly challenging to make short and simple cards that clearly explained user centered design processes.