Healthcare UX Approach
We've spent decades inside surgical suites, ICUs, cath labs, and lab facilities. That observation has shaped how we work today. We translate what clinicians, technicians, and lab scientists need, both spoken and unspoken, into concrete deliverables: anxiety maps, working prototypes, user workflow specifications, and design decisions your team can defend in front of FDA. We get there by observing users' hesitation, anxiety peaks, and trust gaps.
Watch the video on how we approach medical device UX, or read the full article on building exceptional medical device experiences.
Beyond Process: Built on 25+ Years of Observation & Design.
Most UX methodology treats observation, research, and design as separate phases. We treat them as one continuous translation bridge. Every observation inside a clinical environment becomes a design decision. Every workflow ties back to a real user we watched at work. Our engagements are scoped to what your project actually needs: full UX leadership through Summative, Anxiety Maps, focused workflow design, legacy device refinements, or partnership with your existing HFE team.
The depth of involvement scales to your needs.
Want to discuss your project? Contact us.
Immersion
Understanding Stakeholders
Medical device projects involve more than end-users' tasks. The engineering team building the product, the regulatory leads steering FDA submission, and the product owners funding the work all carry constraints that shape the design. We start every engagement by listening across that full team.
Our immersion is not desk research. Whenever possible, we conduct contextual research inside clinical environments — observing how clinicians, technicians, and lab scientists actually use their products. When access to those environments is restricted, we draw on decades of medical device experience and secondary research to document user journeys and workflows that hold up against the real conditions. We also meet with engineering to understand what's technically feasible. We talk with regulatory to map the Summative requirements that will define the Critical Tasks. Then we synthesize what we've heard into a use specification your team can build against.
Depending on the project, immersion runs from on-site observation in surgical suites and labs, to remote sessions with distributed teams, to secondary research when access is limited. The methods scale to the project, not the budget. What stays constant is the depth of attention.
Immersion
Understanding Stakeholders
User journeys
ANXIETY MAPS
User journeys
ANXIETY MAPS
Our user journey maps focus on more than user tasks. We also track the emotional curve of a clinical workflow, where clinicians, technicians, and lab scientists hesitate, reach for workarounds, and where their anxiety climbs during high-stakes moments.
Why does this matter? At those anxiety peaks, clinicians decide whether to trust the device or work around it. Get those moments right, and the device gets adopted. Miss them, and clinicians invent workarounds. The emotional curve tells us where to focus design effort.
Every anxiety map is built on decades of medical device experience. We layer in contextual observation and questionnaires whenever access permits, and synthesize from secondary research when it doesn't. The deliverable is the same: a workflow that highlights where users get anxious during product interactions, and a visual artifact your team can defend in design reviews and use as the foundation for Critical Tasks heading into Summative.
Concept Design
Story Mapping
Story mapping is where we translate Anxiety Maps into a structured product vision. We perform detail documentation of what we observed in clinical environments: the workflow phases, the anxiety peaks, the workarounds clinicians invent. Then we organize all of it into a map of how the device should unfold from the user's perspective.
The story map breaks the device experience into clear phases and priorities. It shows senior leaders and product managers where the product can be improved and where it should go. We work with your engineering team to scope features and functions, and with your regulatory team to determine which workflows anchor Critical Tasks and what to test. Your executive and business teams use the map to decide how the product unfolds across releases.
This is also the moment where the design has to prove itself. Story mapping demonstrates how the new workflow improves on the current state, and how the design addresses users' concerns and the anxiety we identified earlier.
For most UX firms, story mapping is just another milestone. For us, it's one of the most critical steps. Our senior practitioners with decades of medical device pattern recognition perform story mapping to ensure that every user need and anxiety we identified gets addressed in the product vision.
Concept Design
Story Mapping
Concept Design
User Workflows
Concept Design
User Workflows
Workflow specifications are where the story map becomes a "living, breathing application." Every clinical step gets documented in detail: which device control the clinician reaches for, what physical action is required, what the device displays in response, what the next step is. We map the full device interaction: hardware controls, screens, alarms, and connections.
Workflow specifications are a translation of the story map. Every step ties back to behavior we observed in clinical environments or to patterns we've documented across decades of similar devices. The workflow becomes your engineering team's development scope and your regulatory team's anchor for Critical Tasks heading into Summative evaluation.
Usability
Prototyping & Usability Tests
Working prototypes turn workflow specifications into something users can actually interact with. We build prototypes early and often, scaling fidelity to the question being asked.
Prototypes do three things for medical device programs. They let users test workflows in usability sessions, surfacing use errors before development locks them in. They let senior leadership feel the product, then show it to their boards, investors, or clinical advisors. Feeling the product changes how leadership commits to it. And they settle the arguments that wireframes start.
Where the workflow involves physical controls, we prototype the hardware interaction alongside the screen. The full device experience gets prototyped, not just the on-screen flow.
We build in Figma and Figma Make. Every prototype is built with Summative considerations in mind: the workflows we test now are the Critical Tasks we will validate later.
Usability
Prototyping & Usability Tests
Visual Design
Visual Design & Iconography
Visual Design
Visual Design & Iconography
As a UX Design Agency, our Visual Design specialists will provide your project with inspiring iconography and graphics. We can utilize your company’s existing brand or create a new aesthetic to generate a UI style template that will set your company and products apart in the marketplace. Our designers understand the important role of easily identifiable icons and appropriate color schemes in the intuitiveness and world-class appeal of your product.
Development
Software Development
At Areteworks, our development is effective by employing short development cycles to deliver intuitive software across multiple platforms. We ensure quality in every development cycle by concluding each with a phase of meticulous testing. We also leverage our comprehensive collection of custom libraries to reduce development time and costs.
If you are interested in different UX methods.
Development
Software Development
