Outset Medical
2023
Product Design
About Outset
Outset manufactures Tablo, a next-gen home hemodialysis machine.
Tablo has a first-of-its-kind interface designed with patients in mind. Touchscreen guidance, animations, and step-by-step instructions guide the user through dialysis treatments. Most patients are able to learn all device-related activities to start using Tablo at home in less than 4 training sessions, and can resolve an alarm in under 5 seconds.
My title at Outset was Senior Manager of UX and Product design, so I was responsible for the day to day operations of the design team, all research efforts, all product management and stakeholder interactions, and I additionally created processes for authoring requirements.
I will focus on one project that I feel encapsulates my time at Outset
The Destination
Outset consoles are currently only sold to patients in the United States, but the opportunity in global markets is massive. Kidney conditions are not unique to a particular country, they are global, and many patients would benefit from the ability to treat at home.
The Road
The console would need to change in several ways to be viable outside the U.S. (OUS), but the most pressing change needed was concentrates. Concentrates are jugs of Calcium and Potassium that are essential to the chemistry of dialysis. In the US, we are able to make and ship Outset branded jugs, but the cost to do that internationally is prohibitive.
Research findings
We conducted research rounds to understand how dialysis works in other countries. We interviewed nurses, patients, and Field Service Engineer (FSE) to get a clear picture of key moments in device setup.
Key findings:
There are 3 categories of jug: Off the shelf, made from scratch, and modified off the shelf.
A typical facility will re-use a small grouping of jugs.
When an FSE is installing a console, there would need to be site wide policy settings as well as settings specific to a concentrate jug.
The concept to achieve this would need to be agnostic to a screen, meaning it could be in the GUI of the console OR the online portal.
User Personas
Clinic Nurse Manager - They are running the day to day operations, modifying the concentrates as needed for patient prescriptions. They are the key connection between the patients and Outset.
Field Service Engineers - FSE's are responsible for installing a fleet of Tablo consoles at a given clinic, and part of that would be setting up the console for international concentrate use. They are the actual user of this new functionality.
Patients - The patient would 'consume' the settings at treatment time. They would need to see an accurate set of concentrate options that correspond to what the clinic has provided.
Wireframing the Concept
We experimented with several different methods, but we landed on these key flow points:
User sets up the clinic global settings, which set units and other values.
User creates a concentrate profile and give it a unique name.
Each profile can be a selection from a list of off-the-shelf concentrates, totally custom, or modified.
A user can start with and OTS concentrate and then modify it.
A user needs to know that an OTS concentrate has been modified.
Users can perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on a profile.
Final Prototype and Design
The final UI created a model of user flow that could easily be adopted to a web portal environment. We tried to make it as low tap as possible while making the end to end flow feel quick and easy. Instead of making user pick a type of profile, which did not test well, we allowed them to freely create and modify a profile, and simply displayed the modification details in a given item.
