Siemens Healthineers
UX Product Vision for an Integrated Solution in Medical Technology
Splore works as part of the internal UX team at Siemens Healthineers at the interface of UX Research, UX Prototyping and strategic conception. For a new product generation in interventional radiology, Splore developed a UX Product Vision: an experiential target image that makes complex clinical workflows understandable and serves as a guide for development and product management.
Siemens Healthineers
Siemens Healthineers is one of the world's leading providers of imaging systems, laboratory diagnostics, and innovative therapy and service solutions. The company develops technologies that help doctors diagnose diseases more precisely, treat them better, and sustainably improve patient care.
Initial Situation
For the development of a new, system-wide product generation, Siemens Healthineers sought a clear UX Vision. The application context is interventional radiology, an area where two imaging modalities, CT and angiography, come together in one system and are jointly controlled.
Interventional radiologists and radiological staff work under high cognitive load. Many steps must be manually coordinated for the workflow of an intervention to function. The goal was to understand the central needs of these users and derive a consistent user experience from them — a target image that provides guidance for the upcoming product generation. Typical for Splore's work: understanding complex workflows, recognizing dependencies, and deriving optimizations that reduce complexity for users.
Our Approach
How can an overarching UX Vision be developed that provides guidance as a target image, addresses the central needs of users, and supports development decisions?
The starting point was the workflow: How do interventional radiologists and radiological staff actually work with the system? What dependencies exist between the individual steps? And where does the system create complexity that does not serve the clinical process but slows it down?
The Challenges
1. Diverse stakeholder groups with individual requirements
2. Integration of different modalities and systems
3. Complex, safety-relevant operating procedures and strict regulations
4. High demand for user acceptance and regulatory traceability
5. Need for strategic UX governance for future developments
UX Product Vision
Development of a system-wide target image for the future user experience, specifically in the form of a storyline as a pitch presentation with 3D renderings of workflow situations and simulations of the UX. The storyline is based on insights from UX Research and UX Prototyping, making the target image tangible for stakeholders and outlining initial steps towards realization.
Our Service
As part of the internal UX team, Splore has been accompanying product development in Medical Technology at Siemens Healthineers for several years. In this project, Splore worked as an IX Designer: creating concepts, advising the team, translating insights from research into tangible solutions.
The collaboration followed a clear three-step process: understanding what users need. Deriving solutions that can be tested from this. And condensing these solutions into a target image that gives development and management a common direction. Three service areas interlocked:
Identification of latent user needs, central challenges, and optimization potentials. The research followed a qualitative approach with more than ten participants: remote interviews in the USA and Japan, on-site observations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal. Interventional radiologists and radiological staff who work with the system daily were interviewed and observed.
The central insight became the turning point of the entire project: Today, it takes a whole team that must coordinate many manual tasks for the workflow of an intervention to function. This is precisely where systems can do significantly more in the future, through automation and guidance that help users focus on the actual clinical task.
This insight carried the transition from research to vision. It changed the product team's perspective and made it clear that the next product generation does not need to improve individual functions but should rethink the workflow as a whole. The real potential lies not in optimizing individual steps but in how the system supports collaboration in the clinical team.
Translation of insights into concepts: testable, interactive prototypes for continuous development and validation with users and for internal communication. The prototypes made the insights from the research tangible and discussable for the entire product team.
In an interdisciplinary team of development, product management, and design, a description alone is not enough to establish a common understanding. Only an experiential concept — a prototype through which a workflow can actually be played out — makes connections visible and design decisions concretely assessable. The prototypes thus served as a bridge between the research insight and the later target image: They showed what a workflow could look like before the first line of production code is written.
The Result
The UX Vision became the unifying framework – for development, management, and communication.
1.
Clear, evidence-based UX target image for product and development teams
2.
Solid foundation for design decisions & prioritizations for roadmaps
3.
Involvement of all relevant stakeholder groups
4.
Derivation of concrete features and requirements for next product generations
5.
Establishment of the human-centered design process as an innovation method
The real impact of a UX Product Vision, however, is not shown in a list of results. What this project really changed: Technically-minded product managers developed a sense of the needs and pain points of users through the experiential concepts — and derived new ideas for their product from them. The vision serves as a target image and is repeatedly referenced when it comes to the question of where the product should develop.
This shows what a UX Product Vision is for: not as a one-time deliverable, but as a strategic tool that creates a common understanding and guides development decisions over years. As an expansion stage, a UX Product Vision can be further developed into a portfolio vision: It enables product managers and portfolio managers to tell the storyline of the future portfolio from the customer's perspective and thus communicate up to the C-level.
Customer Testimonials
»The perfect product was to be designed – without bias and independent of the development process. The customer needs were professionally collected and documented. The result: a clear product vision with renderings that provide guidance for future steps.«
Do you have questions?
Do you have questions?
Contact us without obligation. Splore founder Jona Rammler is an expert in developing product visions and looks forward to an exchange.
FAQ
The case shows how a UX Product Vision is created when the starting point is not the technology, but the workflow of the users. Splore, as part of the internal UX team, examined complex clinical processes in interventional radiology and developed a target image from them that gives development and product management a common direction. You can find more projects in the Case Overview.
A UX Product Vision is a strategic target image based on insights from UX Research that shows how a product should look and function in the future. What is crucial is what is desirable from the user's perspective; economic viability and technical feasibility are determined in the next step. It makes the future of a product tangible and serves as a guide for development decisions.
The research follows a qualitative approach that combines remote interviews and on-site observations. The people who work with the system daily are interviewed and observed — in this case, in several markets, from the USA and Japan to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal. The goal is to identify latent needs and optimization potentials that only become apparent in the real work context. More about the approach on the UX Research page.
A prototype makes a concrete solution tangible and verifiable. It is used to test individual concepts with users and discuss them within the team. A UX Product Vision goes a step further: It condenses the insights from research and prototyping into a system-wide target image that goes beyond individual functions and guides development decisions over a longer period.