Use Case 1
Senario
In the bioinformatics field, we need to hear words like a tumor, cancer, blood, lung etc. Initially, it was scared when I landed to this domain. Before going into the case study, we need to understand what is this web application product. This product is for clinician and researchers who work in the oncology departments.
Problem
The first step of the process is clinician or researchers will send or upload their patient raw data in the product in the fastq sequence file format the data size will be around 100 GB to 1 TB. Once the file is uploaded the user will provide the initial details and start the analysis for the patient in our product. Initially, we don't know the quality of the data in the file. Once all the process in the analysis completed the report will be generated from our product. If the data is in good quality the report will be good and the information provided by our product will be useful to the user. And the money they spent on this analysis will be useful and they can proceed for the further treatment. In case the quality of the raw file is not good, the analysis will be failed and money spent will be not fruitful for the user or for the patient. This is the problem we faced.
This problem was there in the initial design of the product. While doing the user-centered design process, And created scenarios and did the field study by conducted user interviews with the personas we created. In the process of user interviews only we understand the issue where a lot of money involved in this issue.
Solution
After we came to know the problem from user interviews, we redesigned the product by adding more thought process in it, and we arrived at one solution is to do the quality check once the user uploads their file. If the file is passed in the quality control process it will be allowed to further do the analysis. If the file is failed in quality control we provide the provision to trim or filter the sequence file where they can remove the bad sequence from the file and do the quality check again. Once the file passed the quality control it will be allowed to do the analysis else do the trim and filter process again until it becomes a good sequence file. This problem we solved by using the user-centered design process and saved the money involved in the analysis for the user and their patients.
Use Case 2
Senario
In this use case, we describe how we found another solution for our web app using the usability testing with the prototype.
Problem
We created a high-fidelity prototype for the clinical report, which is the output of the analysis run by the clinician/researchers using their raw data fastq file. The clinical report has detail information about the genes, variants etc. It has in-depth details of the variants whether it is pathogenic or benign. While we did the usability testing using the prototype, the researchers were happy to view the report which has the information what they wanted. But the clinicians were not happy because they had the information they can understand but it can’t provide the treatment for their patients.
Solution
The problem we found using the usability testing was the information for the treatment was not available in the clinical report. So we decided to include the drug information, we also know that this information is not available in our competitors' product also. This we came to know while doing the competitive analysis. The solution we looking for this problem was a huge data and it has to be reliable, if the drug data we provide is wrong then it will sue our product.
After our team did a lot or R&D work on this, we found a solution that a third party is providing drug information for the genes and it also provides the drug details for the variant level. We brought their product and using the API we get the drug information from them and added that information in our web app. The drug details provided by that API has been classified whether it is approved or not. The agencies which approve the drugs are FDA, EMA, HCSC, PMDA. This information also available from them.
We did another round of usability test after adding that treatment information in our clinical report. This time clinician was happy to have this information. This also provides 80% growth in our business.
Use Case 3
Senario
In this user case study, I will share one of my experience while doing usability testing. This helps us to understand the customer experience, they define areas of improvement, which solves the user's problem and increase our business.
Problem
In our product the user uploads the file, set up the basic configuration, most of the fields will be auto-filled if the user(clinician) needs to change any parameters in the configuration they can change it and run the analysis. Once the analysis is complete, the report will be generated and will be available in the report section. The user can view all the reports including clinical, raw data QC etc.,
While doing the usability testing most of the clinician raised the same issue, that how can we share these reports with our patients. As their patients can't access our web app. One more issue also was there that these patient data are more confidential, it should not be shared. Actually, these issues are nice finding and we need to suggest a solution to these issues.
Solution
Providing a solution for the user requirement are the primary goal to the success of each product or service. To attain that goal we need to closely interact with the users for that user research method like user interviews, contextual inquiry and doing the usability testing with the prototype are very useful.
To solve this problem of viewing the report by the patients, we came with the idea to convert the clinical report view portion to portable document file format. So that clinician can download the file, take a print out and hand over to the patients. After discussing with the development team whether this is possible in the technology that we use, we provide the solution for the issue. After we came up with the idea, we did one more round of usability testing with the different set of clinicians. They agreed that this solution will be useful for them. And we developed and incorporated PDF in our application, where our marketing team makes that as a unique selling point of our product.
