Software UI for medical laboratories
Process reliability and efficiency in a awardwinning scalable design
The Tecan MAPlinx™ Software UI supports laboratory personnel with improved user guidance to avoid critical human errors. The intuitive design uses familiar interaction patterns, minimizing staff training time. Each step is highlighted to the user, helping them better plan their next tasks. The user interface is used for OEM purposes and can be customized to match customer branding.
The project and its challenges
The 3 biggest challenges facing clinical diagnostic laboratories are the quality of test results, time to results, and human resources.
We designed and optimized the MAPlinx™ software UI to address these challenges to support laboratories and lab technicians in their daily work with automated lab instruments. The intuitive and human-centered design of the UI guides instrument operators in clinical laboratories through the entire testing process.
First challenge:
Quality of test results
Providing accurate test results to clinicians can be a matter of life and death for patients, making high quality and reliable testing essential for clinical laboratories. Human errors can have major implications for patient care – particularly if only small amounts of sample are available, making retesting impossible – leading to delays that, in the worst case, impact patient outcomes. Replacing manual processing steps with automated laboratory instrumentation helps to ensure fewer mistakes, especially with high workloads.
Design Solution:
Safety by Design
Using real-life animations, the MAPlinx™ UI assists operators in the correct execution of each step, ensuring reliable operation and enhancing process safety. Immediate feedback after every command builds trust and shows the operator that everything is on track. This minimizes the risk of human errors during busy or in stressful periods, as the instrument guides every step. The aim isn’t to shut the user out of the workflow, but to give them the ability to clearly track every step of the automated process, so that they remain in complete control.
Second challenge:
Time to results
Waiting for the results of a COVID-19 PCR test has made everyone realize how important fast time to results is for patients. Unnecessary delays in providing results to clinicians can have a big impact in patient care, so clinical labs have to ensure quick turnaround times from samples to results. But time also plays an important role in the laboratory, with most lab technicians having a lot of work to do each day. Manual processing can be unpredictable, making it difficult to estimate the duration of the various steps in a workflow. Automated laboratory systems are vital to help modern clinical laboratories meet their workload and turnaround time demands, as well as to allow efficient planning of laboratory workflows.
Design Solution:
Increased operation efficiency
The MAPlinx™ UI screen displays the machine's progress so users can easily see remotely what step the machine is performing and how much time it needs to complete it. This ensures lab technicians always know how much time they have left for other tasks for better planning security. 3D videos show which work step is currently in progress, indicating to the lab technician that the machine is currently working independently, and when the results are ready to send to waiting clinicians. In addition, all automated steps are predefined, further speeding up testing.
Third challenge:
Human Resources
Clinical laboratories face an ever-growing demand for diagnostic testing, and COVID-19 has put extra emotional pressure and responsibility on the shoulders of laboratory staff. Compared to manual execution, automated laboratory systems help labs to increase testing capacity by performing many assays simultaneously. However, the pandemic has shown us that, to continue to meet this demand in the face of sudden workload increases, laboratories should look closely at their existing, often highly complex, automation systems to ensure they match current and future needs, especially in terms of usability and scalability.
Design Solution:
Using familiar patterns
The clean and simple design of MAPlinx™ software’s UI allows new staff joining the laboratory to quickly and easily learn to use the automation systems, without the need for extensive training. Inspired by current mobile apps, the intuitive UI targets current and future generations of lab technicians, using recurring elements or interaction sequences across multiple platforms to simplify operations. This creates a modern working environment and inspires positive self-confidence and trust in our instruments, supporting lab technicians to help them avoid unnecessary errors and meet the highest quality standards.
Scalable style guide for different brands
We put special focus on scalable design so that the UI can be easily used for OEM purposes and adapted to the
client's branding. We tested this on 10 different brands. This resulted in a comprehensive style guide that
lays the foundation for the following design systems.
The design has already been applied to other projects.
Our collaboration:
Remote and awardwinning
Our collaboration with Tecan is a special story. The project fell completely in the middle of the Corona pandemic. We never saw our Tecan partners live before or during the project. And there were no face-to-face meetings within the team either. The entire project was managed and executed completely independent of location. Through agile management and Scrum, all disciplines were included in the project management and were able to collaborate efficiently.
This collaboration was awarded the iF DESIGN AWARD in the category Product UX and the Industrial UX Award, as well as nominated for the UX Design Award.
