Transforming how researchers and healthcare organizations bring data to life

Data Import

Flywheel - a medical imaging data management and analysis platform

Company

My Role

UX Designer

We face complex issues importing biomedical imaging data and it’s metadata into our platform quickly and efficiently.

This is the first step to using our software, and it was:

fragile (error-prone)
inconsistent
confusing

The Challenge

Our team was tasked with making this process:

more usable
more accessible
less time-consuming

double the volume of data our cloud customers manage
make parity between upload methods
remove file size roadblocks during upload using auto-scaling

The Task

The Research

As one of the first UX research efforts at the company, we used these methods to ensure we were solving the right problems:

Conducted empathy mapping
Internal and external user interviews

Mapped the persona journey and workflows
Gathered qualitative data to drive interactions
Reviewing of previous requests
Usability Testing

The Findings

In data-driven qualitative and quantitative research, we found:

Researchers are spending most (80%) time in Curation (finding, uploading, and organizing data)
Lack of notifications are a huge issue
Fragility of our existing upload methods renders them unusable
Inconsistent experiences (depends on user’s technical skill level)

Check out more findings in our key insights here!

The Solution

After a lot of research, it was clear that the users want a familiar upload experience, which meant:

No reinventing the wheel
Requests to use Google Drive, box.com or dropbox as a model

See Prototype

The Impact

It’s already made a huge difference for users who have adopted the redesigned data import feature.

“This 2.7 TB import went from taking 6 days, 4 hours in the old import process down to 1 day, 1 hour using the new import method.

… and without any handholding (without having to modify things for it to work). It’s really amazing that you can just transfer such an amount of data (and organize it according to Subjects and Sessions) using just the UI.”

— Pablo Vascelo, Scientific Solutions Engineer

We are continuing to interview customers and following Grafana metrics to gauge a level of success. Success will look like:

Ability to nearly double the volume of data our cloud customers could import (in bulk)
Total number of customers with >10+ imports
An increase in the average number of imports per customer
The success ratio for imports per customer trends positively
Increase in the total number of files successfully imported
Increase in the total number of bytes successfully imported