LUNGevity Clinical Trial Finder
Enhancing Outcomes: Matching Lung Cancer Patients to Trials
As the largest lung cancer patient advocacy group in the United States, LUNGevity wanted to provide an experience for lung cancer patients to find relevant clinical trials. I worked directly with LUNGevity's leadership team to pitch a vision, secure the project, conceptualize the initial experience, and then design, develop, and test the experience that matched lung cancer patients to appropriate clinical trials by tapping into the data of ClinicalTrials.gov through an API Eli Lilly provided.
Role:
• Business Development
• User Research
• Product Design
• Copywriting
• Product Management
• Front-End HTML & CSS
• End-to-end QA Testing
Defining the Problem
The project was initiated with discovery by researching lung cancer patients and the people who support them. Several interviews were held along with a review of existing research materials provided by LUNGevity. This effort built an empathetic understanding of who these people are and what their issues were with available clinical trial resources.
Key Learnings
- Lung cancer patients struggle to navigate the disease and often reach out to nonprofit organizations like LUNGevity for guidance in their journey, outside of their normal care providers.
- Doctors, nurses, and other care providers aren't always aware of what trials exist as they are engaged within their own line of work or trials they help orchestrate.
- Multiple other people support lung cancer patients by researching their specific diseases, providing them with information, and guiding them.
- The ClinicalTrials.gov interface didn't provide an interface or materials that were friendly to lung cancer patients or people involved in supporting them.
The Problem
When patients or people supporting them inquired about clinical trials, they were often pointed in the direction of different resources, given pamphlets, or told only about a trial that didn't fit their specific conditions. All these issues made it difficult for patients to search for, find, and get connected with a clinical trial relevant to their condition.
Defining a Solution
The ideation process started by diving into the Lilly Clinical Open Innovation API to understand all of the various pieces of data that could be displayed. In tandem, experiential ideas were explored and collaborated on with LUNGevity during regular meetings. The project teams discussed the pros and cons of building out tools for navigators, doctors, and patients for web, mobile, social, and event platforms. We ultimately landed on a web app that could be a branch of their main website.
Solution Direction
Build a responsive web app that would provide a low barrier to entry for anyone to locate a clinical trial while retaining their privacy. Ensure the solution meets the following capabilities:
- Allows patients to fill in disease, mutation, and other filters based on their specific condition to be matched with a clinical trial
- Makes clinical trial information more approachable to patients and support staff by clearly stating what the clinical trial is researching and what the eligibility criteria for the trial are
- Empowers patients and the people supporting them to connect to a clinical trial they are interested in joining by providing a location search, map directions, and a phone number.
- Taps into the Lilly Open Innovation API to pull in the most trials posted on ClinicalTrials.gov through a LUNGevity-owned and maintained experience.
- Ensure the solution and technology are scaleable and can be built upon over time.
Research & Definition
With a solution direction and general requirements in place, the initial flow of the site alongside a rough information architecture was whiteboarded out. Data elements from the Lilly Open Innovation API were mapped into the information architecture along with other desired application elements.
After identifying and agreeing upon the underlying informational components, card sorting was used to understand how people would generally categorize this type of information information. This resulted in several critical tweaks to the information architecture and the introduction of a screening concept.
Defining the Experience
Preliminary research and card sorting exercises were used to define the experience of how to connect patients and the people supporting them to clinical trials. Various ideas for the page information hierarchy were brainstormed through quick sketches. Several ideas were explored via low-fidelity wireframes. Wireframes were digitalized for the site's various pages and then put into a flow diagram.
Ideas within the wireframes were pieced together into the final direction.
Final wireframes were mapped out into a flow diagram.
Aiding User Direction With Messaging
With the information architecture plan in place and an experiential direction established, messaging all of the website’s content was written for each component.
Ensuring the content was concise, and that it directed the user through the site way was critical to ensuring users would be able to find clinical trials matching their criteria.
Iterating Based on User Feedback
A foundation for the experience was fully established and brought to testers and stakeholders to review via several user testing and feedback collection phases. Multiple pieces of feedback were collected and iterated upon, not limited to:
- Providing specific page navigation for a selected clinical trial
- Increasing the legibility of fonts placed on colored backgrounds
- Improving the search experience by adding a filter hierarchy
- Incorporating additional filtering options where possible
- Breaking out study eligibility criteria into a section block for greater discoverability
Delivering the Solution
With an information layout plan in place, the user interface design was explored. LUNGevity had core brand colors, fonts, and basic UI elements of their site in place, but the rest of the site design was open to exploration. A friendly and conversational feel was considered when applying typefaces, colors, form fields, and iconography to the design. Information hierarchy and componentization of informational elements were also a key factor in building out a low-maintenance solution.
Several rounds of user and stakeholder feedback were used to iterate on the experience via design and front-end development. This resulted in the final solution shown below.
Landing Page
About Page
Screening Page
Clinical Trial Search Page
Selected Clinical Trial
Front-End Development
The web app quickly moved into development after a few design iterations. Not only was I in charge of all the various moving pieces of the user experience, but I was also in charge of executing the front-end development of the site.
Developed to Be Fully Responsive
Having access to clinical trial information in clinics, coffee shops, and any particular environment is important. A responsive approach was taken to ensure the developed front-end would display for all users in any location of use (at clinics, homes, hospitals, etc).
Middle-tier and Backend Dev Collaboration & Testing
As iterations of the middle-tier and backend development were incorporated with the front-end, I led up providing direction and feedback to the development teams, testing the web app, and ensuring the different components of the solution were ready to use. Several feedback documents were created and shared with the team to address needed development changes and design enhancements to ensure the best possible experience was created.
The LUNGevity Clinical Trials Finder web app launched once the app development was finished, tested, and approved. I collaborated directly with the client alongside a project manager to create various deliverables that resulted in the live web app.
The Outcome
The LUNGevity Clinical Trial Finder app provided an experience for lung cancer patients, their support network, and others to quickly find and connect to clinical trials relevant to their specific disease and treatment stages.
LUNGevity began marketing the app and people adopted the tool as the place to search for lung cancer trials due to the upgraded search experience compared to ClinicalTrials.gov and other sites. The project was such a success, that LUNGevity continued the engagement with Composite Apps to maintain the site as well as kick off a new project: the Lung Cancer Navigator app (shown below).
I was the Design Director over this effort, pitching the initial ideas and workflows to LUNGevity. Shortly after, Steve Goodwin was brought on as the Senior UI/UX Designer to finalize experiential flow, UI Design, and prototype. The Clinical Trials Finder became an important part of this experience where patients could quickly pull the app up to search for clinical trials relevant to them while engaging with the rest of their support network.
CODY THOMPSON
Colorado Product Designer | Currently Working Remotely for Storable