PTMF ?
The Pfizer Trial Master File (PTMF) system and process are the realisation of the commitment Pfizer made to the multiple regulatory agencies. It provides real-time data and metrics allow study teams to proactively see which documents are coming due based on milestone date.
Timeline
1 Year and 4 months | Jul 2021 - Sep 2022
Role and Team
Leading a team of 3 designers, I worked as a Senior UX designer along with 2 Visual designers and 1 UX designers on 2 research sprints and 5 design sprints.
What I did
My responsibilities included understating overall landscape, ideating solutions, prototyping UI, business assessment and concept validation.
In the research sprint, I delivered a user research report, which consisted of insights from user interviews, user personas, and journeys. In design sprints, I delivered and also assessed visual designs for 14 modules.
I enhanced the user's experience by streamlining how users set up, monitor and maintain the quality and completeness of the TMF. I achieved this by constant A/B testing, which also helped in decreasing the time taken by the users to complete the task .
What does providing a "great user experience" actually mean in clinical research, and how does this philosophy deliver tangible benefits to people? Realising the vision, I started with the project. I applied the UX lens of consumer technology to clinical research, which made participation more seamless, engaging, and valuable for people.
1. Many frustrations were around the inefficiencies of task completion, system level visibility of information, and accuracy of the information. Many users seem to be conducting repetitive tasks that require lengthy task completion times. This is due to multiple step process that requires submission, quality checks, rework, review, and final acceptance.
2. Second, users had a hard time finding information and what events took place that lead to a decision. Lastly, users did not trust PTMF data, especially while conducting searches or viewing metrics & reports. Causing many users to look deep into the data themselves to confirm information.
3. In the end, PTMF does provide users with a tool to complete their work, but users tend to see an impact in their productivity levels due to system constrains and process inefficiencies.
Click here to view User Interview Summary Report
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The complex nature of the website necessitated more than 1500 screens covering modules like widgets and reports, grids, forms, pop up and etc. To maintain consistency and ensure efficient design to dev handover, I developed a modular design system based on reusable components and their states, such as grids, toasts, and forms. Every component can be rearranged and combined with others while maintaining design consistency and recognizable UI patterns for the user.
Many users need a quick way on home page to check the status of their documents and placeholders. Through this summary widget, now users can check the status in seconds. Earlier they used to do it through search, which was a lengthy process.
Users wanted to submit more documents every day, adding ghost text helped them in increasing productivity and also with error prevention.
Many users mentioned that it is tiresome to switch between the PTMF website and the inbox. To resolve the issue, I introduced the comment field at various places to smooth communication. This also ensures that any important information is not missed.
The tooltip text and the document count helps user know the supported file format, this helps user in error prevention.
Creating a primary design system (fonts, buttons, icons, spacing) before the team starts creating high fidelity screens reduces time spent on post standardization. A modular system allows the development team to build screens faster with all the components that make up the screens in one place. This also allows scalability of the design components across other services in the future.
Here I got the experience to work with 40+ domain experts, 30+ front end developers, 10 + back end developers, 2 project managers and 3 business analyst.
While designing PTMF, information architecture was the backbone of this complex system. The Information architecture became the foundation of the system and it helped design the navigational context of the system and if the foundation is strong, the experience will be stronger.