Passion Discovery: How I discovered my passion for product design.

Design Journey

Discovering my passion:
How my previous work led me to product design

Due to intellectual property guidelines, I am unable to share specific product details or showcase exact project assets. Instead, I have utilized placeholder images & generalized verbiage to depict the process.

Context

I worked as a product labeling specialist at Qfix, a medical device manufacturing company, where I led a cross-functional project to redesign the instructional manuals. Managing this project was instrumental in discovering my passion for product design.

challenge

How might we reduce the translation costs of IFUs (instructions for use) while improving the end-user comprehension?

solution

Replaced majority of the text with illustrations, reducing translation costs by average 40% and greatly improving the end-user comprehension.

Timeframe

6 months

MY Role

Product Labeling Specialist & Project Manager

Team

Engineering
Industrial Design
Regulatory
Quality
Marketing

Quick overview of What qfix does

Qfix makes the product.

Qfix manufactures patient positioning & immobilization devices for cancer treatments.

Qfix ships the product with its specific IFU.

Medical device law requires that IFUs must be sent along with the device.*

Hospitals around the world receive the product.

Hospitals in the U.S. and around the world use the device for cancer treatment

Translations are required for non-English speaking countries.

IFUs are sent to the translation vendor to get translated into multiple languages, and the cost has been rising as the amount of exports increased.

*Law requires that all medical equipment, devices, and accessories sold for clinical use to include appropriate labeling. including the IFU. Source: 21 Code of Federal Regulations Part 801 - Labeling

Understanding Pain points

Text-heavy IFUs (instructions for use) were long, took time to read, and were expensive to translate.

User pain point: IFUs are too long

2 types of users exist →

Both user types found the IFUs long and time consuming to read fully.

End user: External customers

Clinicians, therapists, hospital workers

Goal: To read and follow instructions on the IFUs to correctly use the medical device.

Pain point: IFUs are text heavy and take time to read & follow.

Intermediary user: Employees

Service engineers, sales rep, marketing

Goal: To learn how to use the device for presentations/demos.

Pain point: IFUs too long to read.

"I had to read the IFU thoroughly several times to fully understand." – Joanne, the service engineer.

Business pain point: IFUs are expensive to translate

IFUs are text-heavy.

Majority of the content including the warnings, cautions, safety guidelines, and step-by-step instructions were all written in text.

Exports increased, more languages to translate.

Number of countries that the company supports have been growing.

Translation cost multiplied, cancelling away the profits.

To support the growing number of countries, IFUs had to be translated into multiple languages. Sadly, translation cost exponentially increased, cancelling away the profits.

Defining the Problem & Setting goals

Problem

Translation cost for the IFUs (instructions for use) increased to support multiple languages, canceling away the company’s profits.
Users found text-heavy IFUs time-consuming to read.

Goals

To reduce translation cost by replacing majority of the text with illustrations.
To create intuitive and guided experience of the IFUs for the users to easily follow and understand.

Competitive research

Although not a direct competitor, we identified strengths in IKEA’s image-driven and extremely concise instructional manuals.

Ikea is known for their simple yet immensely helpful instructional manuals. We analyzed Ikea's instructional manuals to learn how they utilize illustrations to guide their users through specific number of actions.

Strengths of IKEA instructional manuals are:

Use of clear & consistent icons for caution, warning, what to do vs. not to do, & directions.
Clearly labeled numbers for steps.
Enlarged views for fine details.
Minimal use of color (only shades of black and gray) to keep everything simple.

Information architecture

Deconstructing the long blocks of text into clearly defined segments to understand the existing content & structure.

Went line by line, highlighting the long blocks of text in the IFUs.

Highlighting scheme developed:

Green: keep
Blue: convert to illustrations
Red: remove entirely
Purple: remove, relocate to marketing materials
Yellow: unsure, to be discussed

*This process was a cross functional effort among industrial designer, manufacturing & design engineers, regulatory, quality, marketing, and product labeling.

Transition from text to illustrations

Having identified text that can be converted into images (blue highlights), took photos as placeholders to quickly create low-fi drafts.

1. Parsing the blue highlights.

First isolated blue highlights and parsed the content into short, concise steps.

Involved: Product Labeling & Marketing & Engineering.

2. Taking photos as placeholders.

We then took photos based on the shortened steps from above the parsing activity.

Involved: Product Labeling & Industrial Design.

3. Creating low-fi drafts.

Then I pieced together photos in logical order along with the remaining text using InDesign & Illustrator.

Involved: Product Labeling.

4. Quick recap with the team.

Brief cross-functional meeting to validate the overall layout, comprehension, and content before committing the photos to illustrations.

Involved: Industrial Design, Manufacturing & Design Engineering, Regulatory, Quality, Marketing, and Product Labeling.

Visual design

Having validated the low-fi drafts, photos were turned into illustrations and high-fidelity version of the IFU was created.

While there was an existing design system for the original IFUs, there wasn’t one for the redesigned version.

I collaborated with the industrial designer* to compose style documentation.

*Our talented industrial designer converted the photos to illustrations – he hand-drew them!

Usability testing

Conducted 2 rounds of in-person usability testings* to ensure successful user comprehension of the redesigned IFUs.

*Recruited testers from different departments within the company for about 40 minute usability testing session per person. Users interacted with actual medical device with the redesigned IFU. Depending on the complexity of the IFUs, 3-4 rounds of usability testings were also conducted.

Validated the redesigned IFUs for:

Ease of reading & following the illustrations.
Layout format & organization of the content.
Clear communication of caution, warning, and other safety guidelines.

Because this was our very first time tackling the redesign effort, multiple iterations were made upon usability testing.

2 major types of iterations →

Major iteration #1:

Tweaks to the Illustrations.

Tweaks to the illustrations were made to clarity specific depiction of motion & action.

Major iteration #2:

Reintroduction of the text.

Subheaders and concise phrases were reintroduced to support the visuals and to clarify confusion.

Final QA check

Conducted a final cross-functional meeting for a quality check to ensure overall consistency & comprehension.

Assessed the final, redesigned IFUs for:

Overall look, layout & organization.
Clarity of the illustrations.
Clarity of the remaining written instructions.
Consistency in use of icons, color, & typography,
Compliance with the regulations (cautions, warnings, safety guidelines must be clearly communicated).

Successful Product delivery

Sent the the redesigned IFUs to the translations vendor, and we were thrilled to see the cost savings!

Before: Text-heavy, takes long to read, and expensive to translate into multiple languages

After: Lighter text, images improve user comprehension, average 40% reduction in translation costs per one language. Imagine the savings for multiple languages!

Reflections

It was only after I had completed the project that I realized I had been implementing the design process to take the project from the start to finish. I didn't know about design thinking nor had much knowledge on UX at the time. Still, it was possible to practice design thinking, and the processes felt natural, intuitive, and helped me reach the final goal.
Conducting user research, learning from competitive analysis, designing quick low-fi wireframes, establishing component library, conducting usability testings, and iterating upon feedback – I truly enjoyed each part of the process. It was amazing to see how a small change could make a systematic impact on the final design.
And as I learned more about UX design, I felt more convinced and committed. It felt natural to transition into learning more about design. So here I am, excited to step into the world of technology & design, ready to apply what I've learned and also to grow and be challenged in new ways. 😊

Cartoon depiction of my path to design, just for fun! ↴

Discovering my passion: How my previous work led me to product design

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Discovering my passion:
How my previous work led me to product design