My Study Team

The traditional method of acquiring patients for new clinical research trials usually involves low budget TV ads played during daytime television that target one particular medical diagnosis.

The goal of the ads was to have the potential patient talk to the call center, answer a huge amount of medical questions and then have the call center agent determine if they are qualified for the study.

How do we improve an inefficient phone-centric process and bring it into the 21st century?

Problem

Having your primary recruiting funnel dependent on phone calls from ads pose a lot of problems. Call center employees are expensive and require a lot of training on talking through complex medical questions. The ads are often paid for by a particular pharmaceutical company and so if the potential patient called in for that particular ad and didn’t qualify for the study we could not ethically suggest they try to enroll in a different study by a competing company for the same ailment.

Most importantly, the user experience was terrible. While doing user research into the various acquisition methods a customer said “I wanted to join a trial so I called in but I felt more like cattle instead of a real person with diabetes.” Clinical research is a noble thing to participate in and can help people get access to care before it is readily available to the public, but people obviously have hesitations and our methods were not very reassuring.

There is a lot going on with this page. There are blue buttons all over the screen cluttering the UI. There are no labels for the icon buttons so users don't know what their purpose is. It is also very unclear what the user is supposed to do at any given status.

The status on the old view made the line all one solid color which made it really difficult to read, especially on mobile devices directly in the sun. The new status indicator increases the contrast, making it easier to read and a cleaner interface.

There is functionality on the old view that allows for quoting a part from multiple vendors that is user for less than 5% of parts. By removing this from the UI it makes it a lot more user friendly.

There were also icon buttons on each item that were not used very often and also had no labels so users didn't know what they did. By taking those same actions and putting them into the ellipsis button it gives space for future growth.

The old view is not mobile responsive and is built using table rows. The new view simplifies the UI and allows for modern architecture that looks great on desktop, tablet, and mobile screen sizes.

Solution

Using various brainstorming methods we started to explore positioning our company as a service to help people get paired with research trials that were right for them. By approaching the relationship between CRO (contract research organization) and participant we could give patients more control over how they engaged with clinical research. We also wanted to soften the initial screening process which normally involved a lot of up front and personal questions about the patient’s health. By asking simpler questions we were able to widen our funnel, weed out those who might not qualify for the complex (and high paying) trials, then reserve the lead for a different study with less stringent criteria. We branded this service My Study Team.

We also decided to focus our search less on TV ads and use our relationships with dr. offices to target individuals who might might qualify for research studies. We wanted to design a very simple and easy to use ipad app in those dr. offices.

My Study Team App

Clear Communication

There is a lot of distrust in the clinical research industry. It was important to have clear communication not only for what the steps were in the process but also why we were capture the data we needed. There is a big difference between "Where do you live?" and "So I can find research facilities near you, where do you live?".

Simple CTA

Because a lot of our target audience are elderly I wanted to make sure at any stage it was very clear what the call to action was.

Wider Net

Because pharmaceutical companies paid our organization higher amounts for qualified patients of rarer ailments we wanted to approach onboarding differently. By broadly asking patients which studies they might be interested in, it allowed us to better direct patients to studies that were more lucrative for the company.

Results

The launch of the feature was very well received with the large majority of users choosing to use this view over the previous one. There were a couple of hold outs but that's okay. A valuable lesson I learned from this project was that not all users have the same needs and giving them the right tools for the job is more valuable than trying to force one particular workflow onto everyone.

The best validation was interviewing customers post-launch to gather feedback where one of the shop managers said this:

"I like that new parts view a lot better. I am a simple guy and it just makes more sense to me. The button thing was a good idea because it gives my people a better understanding of where we are at in the whole process."

- Andy the Shop Manager

The old view is not mobile responsive and is built using table rows. The new view simplifies the UI and allows for modern architecture that looks great on desktop, tablet, and mobile screen sizes.