Medical device
design consultant
UX and human factors.
Experience you can work with directly.
Steven Liu
Founder & Principal UX Strategist, Areteworks
Westlake Village, California · Working with healthcare teams worldwide
Featured In
Trusted by medical device leaders since 2002
- Medrad
- Edwards Lifesciences
- COBE
- Thermo Fisher Scientific
- Johnson & Johnson
- DermSpectra
- Medtronic
- ANEUVO
- Life Technologies
- Alcon
- Baxter
- Enigma Diagnostics
- Ormco
- Braun
- Niche Bio
- Life Scan
- Gambro
- Wavetec Vision
- Advanced Bionics
About Steven
Medical device expertise.
A deeper understanding
of your users.
I’m Steven Liu, founder of Areteworks, with 25+ years designing Class II and Class III medical devices and healthcare applications that clinicians, patients, and caregivers can use with confidence.
My services include Fractional UX leadership, clinical workflow design, UX design, user research, Anxiety Maps, formative evaluation, and summative validation support.
When needed, I use Anxiety Maps, which many clients have found valuable for uncovering users’ hesitation, uncertainty, and workarounds—and understanding where and why confidence breaks down. These findings guide clearer workflows, predictable product behavior, and prototypes tested early with intended users.
You work directly with me from research through design, alongside your product, engineering, and human factors teams, with documentation to support FDA submissions when needed.
Consulting services
Senior expertise, where your team needs it.
Focused consulting engagements and ongoing fractional UX leadership.
Medical device UX
& human factors
Review existing designs, clarify complex tasks, modernize legacy products, and develop workflows that support your team’s human factors work.
User research
& workflow design
Understand clinician and patient needs through observation, interviews, task analysis, and Anxiety Maps. Turn the evidence into practical design decisions.
Fractional UX
leadership
Add an experienced design leader to your team. Define priorities, guide product decisions, establish design systems, and carry the work through development.
How we work together
From the right questions to a clearer design.
Start with your product, your users, and the decisions your team needs to make.
Review your product and priorities
Discuss the development stage, existing research, workflow concerns, and decisions ahead. Agree on a focused scope and useful deliverables.
Understand the whole workflow
Study what intended users do, what they need, and where uncertainty begins—including handoffs, interruptions, and recovery.
Prototype, test, and refine
Explore concepts with interactive prototypes. Use formative usability testing to identify difficulties and refine the design with intended users.
Support your next steps
Deliver design guidance, prototypes, and research findings your team can use. Coordinate with engineering and human factors specialists as needed.
What your engagement can include
- Fractional UX leadership
- UX assessment
- Clinician & patient research
- Task & workflow analysis
- Anxiety Maps
- Interactive prototypes
- Formative usability findings
- Design systems & UI guidelines
Selected work · Edwards Lifesciences
Clarity in complex
clinical workflows.
HemoSphere brings complex hemodynamic information into the clinical workflow. Areteworks’ work on the monitoring experience reflects the attention to information hierarchy, task flow, and clinician needs that I bring to consulting engagements.
Explore the Edwards HemoSphere project
Selected work · DermSpectra
Guided imaging.
Clearer clinical review.
DermSpectra brings patient-guided total-body imaging and clinician review into one connected system. Areteworks designed the experience across booth positioning guidance, image comparison, lesion annotation, and treatment tracking—supporting both the patient taking the images and the dermatologist reviewing them.
Explore the DermSpectra projectProfessional background
Experience and education.
Experience
Areteworks Product Design
Founder & Principal UX Strategist
2002–present
Leading UX strategy, research, and design for medical devices, healthcare applications, and scientific instruments. Consulting experience spans cardiovascular systems, neurostimulation, ICU monitoring, and laboratory workflows.
Education & professional development
Stanford University
Design Thinking and Innovation Masters Program
UC San Diego
Questions about working together
What does a medical device design consultant help with?
I help teams understand intended users, resolve workflow problems, and turn research into usable product designs. An engagement can include a focused UX review, user research, prototypes, formative usability testing, or ongoing design leadership.
Will I work directly with Steven?
Yes. I lead the consulting engagement and work directly with your team to define priorities, review findings, and guide design decisions. We identify any additional research, design, or specialist support when defining the project scope.
Can you work alongside our existing team?
Yes. I can collaborate with your product, engineering, and human factors teams on a defined project or provide ongoing fractional UX leadership.
Can you help modernize an existing medical device?
Yes. I review the current workflows, existing research, and user feedback to understand what should change. We can then explore and evaluate improvements while considering how they affect familiar tasks and the wider product experience.
How do you support human factors work and FDA submissions?
I provide user research, task analysis, design documentation, and formative usability findings within the agreed scope. When summative validation is needed, I coordinate with human factors specialists and your regulatory team.
How do we get started?
Start with a free 30-minute medical device UX review. We’ll discuss your product, where your team needs support, and what a useful consulting engagement could include.
Need an experienced medical device design consultant?
Let’s discuss your product and the decisions ahead.