0-to-1 Life Sciences Mobile App

The client for this project was a small team within an investment bank that funded numerous life science companies. Their existing product was designed for industry leaders and investors to help clarify the life sciences' industry funding ecosystem. The client first approached my company (thoughtbot) to help conceptualize a mobile app. This project spanned two engagements: the first was a short engagement to help the team round on an idea for their mobile app (a la a Product Design Sprint ✨). A few months later, the client returned to undergo another Product Design Sprint and build an MVP mobile app to support their existing product.

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(First Engagement) Product Design Sprint, Week 1

Duration: 1 week

My Roles

• Product Design Sprint Facilitator
• Co-created Working Prototype

Phase Summary

As project lead, I planned and led a week-long Product Design Sprint with our client’s primary stakeholder and another designer on the thoughtbot team. The goal of the sprint was to generate a prototype for a life sciences social application, then gather feedback from users within two weeks.
We kicked off the sprint with ‘Expert Interviews:’ we interviewed leaders in the life sciences to understand how they used our client’s current web platform and their pain points around funding and networking within their industry. We identified that leaders loved our client’s weekly newsletter, which outlined funding events in the life sciences space. Thus, our sprint focused on creating a high-value experience around funding news and updates.

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(First Engagement) Product Design Sprint, Week 2: User Interviews

Duration: 1 week

My Roles

• Co-facilitate Interviews
• Prototype Iteration

Phase Summary

My designer colleague and I tested the prototype with numerous life science industry leaders. We compiled our findings day by day, rapidly iterating and refining our prototype as we gathered feedback. We ended this engagement with a rapidly-iterated-upon prototype with design decisions supported by user feedback.
Our client presented this prototype to their company as a proof-of-concept, which allowed them to get further sign-off for another longer-term engagement with thoughtbot.

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(Second Engagement) Product Design Sprint, Week 1

Duration: 1 week

My Roles

• Product Design Sprint Facilitator
• Prepared User Interview Script
• Co-created Working Prototype

Phase Summary

Again acting as project lead, I planned and led another week-long Product Design Sprint with our client's primary stakeholder. The goal of this sprint was to explore the viability of a social app for the life sciences, this time with more defined technical limitations.

Our client envisioned creating a 'Slack for the life sciences:' an application that could support different types of group discussions and individual posts for life science professionals. The goal of the sprint was to identify the highest-value user behaviors we could support within our small development window. We also wanted to conceptualize a product that could scale in later development sprints after the team had acquired more user engagement data and interview findings.

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(Second Engagement) Product Design Sprint, Week 2: User Interviews

Duration: 1 week

My Roles

• Co-facilitated user interviews
• Prototype Iteration

Phase Summary

My designer colleague and I again built a prototype and tested it with professionals who worked in the life science industry. Those excited about the product tended to be either professionals who were younger in age or who were working in startup-like environments. Many described a strong sense of community within their academic or company spheres but struggled to connect with professionals from other institutions.
To better understand this struggle, our team explored the limitations of existing professional networking platforms (LinkedIn, ResearchGate) for life science professionals. We continued to iterate on our prototype and began rounding on the core functionality that consistently excited.
From there, we navigated a build-vs-buy conversation with our primary stakeholder. We proposed white-labeling Stack Overflow as a proof-of-concept, as the product contained much of the functionality we found to be valuable to users. In the end, our client elected that we build a lo-fi social app to operate as a high-fidelity learning tool in its Beta state. After launching in Beta, our client planned to gather user data and scope continued builds, eventually integrating the mobile app with our client's web app.
With this in mind, we adopted our client's existing web app design patterns and adjusted our product scope to offer basic but flexible functionality for future scaling efforts.

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UX/Visual Design Refinements & MVP Implementation Planning

Duration: 3 days

My Roles

• Project Management
• Design Thinking Facilitation
• Design Iteration

Phase Summary

In this phase, I became the only designer on the project. With our client’s needs and findings from the Product Design Sprint in hand, I led our team and client through a feature prioritization planning exercise using an impact/effort matrix. We quickly assessed which features to include in our MVP and which to funnel into our backlog. As my developer colleagues and I began building, I built out a basic design system, consulting with our client’s in-house designer to ensure that our design aligned with our client’s established design patterns.

React Native Implementation

Duration: 8 weeks

My Roles

• Design Implementation (React Native)
• Ongoing Project Management

Phase Summary

Our team launched the MVP app in two months. I was responsible for Product Management, Design, and Design implementation in React Native.

We conducted weekly demos with our client, updating the team on our progress and reviewing our upcoming work from our MVP features list. I also helped our client build a strategy to seed the app with high-value content and roll out the app to a subset of their users. I conducted surveys and referenced user data to develop a content strategy for seeded content.

The mobile app was submitted and approved to both the Apple and Android stores before the end of our team’s engagement. Our client is currently beta testing the app with a subset of their clients.

Real talk...

Visual design wasn't a priority on this project, so one afternoon I spruced up the basic design styles inside Figma for fun 💃
See it on Dribbble

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