GE Healthcare

2010 – 2011

Radiologists relied on GE Healthcare’s Centricity software to review patient images and record diagnoses. Speed and accuracy are critically important for successful patient outcomes.

As a master’s candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, our team of four was given the opportunity to improve the design of this software.

My Contributions
Team Lead
Research
Prototyping
Interaction design
Visual design

Research

Our team spent months understanding the design challenge. We interviewed doctors and nurses, embedded ourselves in radiology offices, analyzed competing products, and conducted an extensive literature study.

Photos from our extensive research phase

Synthesis

We compiled a massive amount of data, and it took weeks to process it all. We relied heavily on the contextual inquiry method to structure our research and subsequent synthesis sessions.

Having a physical space dedicated to synthesis was essential for a project of this scale.

Modeling

We created models to make sense of the vast amount of data we collected by organizing it into coherent and meaningful structures. Models also serve as a shared language that helped us to communicate our findings to stakeholders.

Again, we followed contextual inquiry in our modeling. For example, we made a flow model to identify roles, responsibilities, and communication patterns, and a cultural model to capture values and beliefs that shaped user behavior.

Flow model illustrating how information moves among people

Cultural model reflecting interpersonal dynamics within the practice

Prototyping

Once we had a deep understanding of the problems we were trying to solve, we set to work prototyping solutions. We started with quick & dirty paper prototypes, gradually working our way up to clickable digital prototypes as our confidence in our design increased.

Prototyping at increasing levels of fidelity

Outcomes

At the end of our project, we presented GE Healthcare with a 200-page report on our work, a high-fidelity prototype, and a detailed specification for our redesign recommendations.

We received an A on our work, and GE Healthcare was impressed enough to renew their partnership with Carnegie Mellon for another year.

I made this 2:15 video presenting our redesign vision

Designed & built by me with Framer

© 2024

Designed & built by me with Framer

© 2024

Designed & built by me with Framer

© 2024