InnitData

Led a team of designers and created an elegant, engaging, and empowering SaaS platform designed to help researchers manage their project workflows and recruit study participants.

Themes

UX Research & Strategy

Product Design

Brand Design

UI Design

Product Development

Team

Jeremy Nguyen Meghan Martin Siona Balaji

Tools

Figma

Clickup

Typeform

Airtable

Miro

Zoom

Timeline

6 months

September 2020 - February 2021

Intro

A Short Story

Jeremy, a researcher at Stanford and the founder of InnitData, was intrigued by the lack of research participant recruiting platforms. His inbox was full of repeated emails from colleagues, his hallways were full of advertisements, and his phone was constantly ringing. It seemed he could never escape the constant barratement of people asking him if he’d be interested in a study.

He thought, there must be a better way.

Goal

Can We Reimagine How Researchers Engage, Recruit, and Manage Study Participants?

It is estimated that a large majority of delayed clinical trials are a result of an inability to recruit enough participants. Even worse, many studies that proceed, fail to recruit a diverse set of participants, meaning their findings rarely represent the diversity of our communities in the United States.

With the rise of COVID-19, these problems are only becoming more pronounced. Researchers are relying on multiple unconnected mediums -- social media, phone calls, emails, word of mouth, recruitment platforms, and even CraigsList, which is making it even harder for them to fill their studies with ideal candidates.

80% - 85% Studies are Delayed A majority of these delays are caused by the challenge of finding and enrolling qualified participants.

11% Fail to Recruit a Single Participant Studies that can’t gather enough participants are doomed to fail.

Competitive Research

Breakdown of Existing Competitors

We began this project by investigating the competitive field and surveying similar products on the market. These sites included Clara Health, Science37, antidote, TrialSpark, Prolific, FindParticipants, and Respondent.

What we found was that the market is oversaturated with competition around recruiting participants. However, there was a huge opportunity for a service to help researchers manage the entire life cycle of their studies. Instead of simply stopping with the recruiting process, InnitData will help them manage and communicate with their participants, in order to ensure that the research study is completed on schedule.

Disjointed and Ineffective Mediums Researchers struggle to stay organized over long-term studies, because they have no option, but to use several mediums to accomplish their tasks. These include finding, communicating with, getting consent, conducting the study, and documenting the study.

Data Quality + Evaluating Eligibility Current solutions make it difficult for researchers to ensure that possible participants meet eligibility criteria prior to engaging with a study. Moreover, they find it difficult to evaluate their existing pool to ensure that the quality of their data is as strong as possible.

Continued Trust and Engagement Due to the long term nature of clinical trials, many researchers find it difficult to keep participants engaged over the lifetime of the study. This makes it difficult for them to ensure that participants are completing their tasks on time and reporting back their experiences.

Awareness and Ability to Use the Technology Many researchers have to redirect much needed funds to advertise their studies. Moreover, the ads themselves are often out of place and use descriptions that aren't always accessible to potential participants.

User Research

User Interviews

“I have gotten disingenuous responses from Craigslist. Social media ads can be costly, depending on how you advertise. It’s hard to find the right participants.”

Once we had completed our market analysis, we began to reach out to research professionals, to gain a better understanding of their preference for existing products, and their major pain points.

We then used this data to create user personas and user journeys. One persona group represented the researchers, who needed to find participants, and the other persona group represented the participants, who were interested in taking part.

DESIGN DIRECTION

Design Principles, Visual Direction, Color and Typography, Brand Goals and UX Writing.

We focused on our mission to develop the design direction and stick to a simple style guide. Language in research plays a major role in engaging with the users. In order to reduce the intimidating nature of the work, we decided to keep the tone and language “easy to understand” and “interactive” for the participants, but straightforward for the researchers to reduce redundancy.

Moving to High Fidelity

Consistent, Reusable Components

We decided to keep these themes of simplicity and consistency in mind while sketching concepts for the new base. I aimed to design both the architecture and UI of the product that not only made users feel less intimidated but one that developers would appreciate as well.

We reused components across multiple pages in the flow. Not only did this reduce technical complexity, but it also established a consistent pattern for the user.

The Final Product

A Wholistic MVP to Manage Clinical Research Projects

Our goal was to design a simple, friendly experience that would empower both researchers and participants to connect remotely.

Post Studies

In order for InnitData to be successful, it was essential that we designed an built an easy and straightforward system for posting studies. This form will help users write the description for their study, specify their methodology, and define their audience to meet their needs.

These details will ensure that they are able to present their study to the best possible participants, and get high-quality recruits.

Finally, researchers will be able to preview what their study will look like, both as a page, and a simple card, before publishing it to the website.

Manage Participants and Assign Tasks

InnitData is designed with researchers in mind. Therefore, we do not stop the flow once candidates are accepted, but instead help researchers assign these participants to different research groups. They can assign tasks to individual groups, which will help them keep these participants on track with their study.

This should also help researchers perform batch actions, improve their workflows, and help them keep track of their enrolled participants over the lifetime of their study.

Wholistic Dashboard

The Researcher Dashboard is designed to help researchers get actionable insights into their published studies. The dashboard allows researchers to see their upcoming tasks, their monthly calendar, the statistics on their open studies, their messages, and their draft studies.

Features for Respondents

Get Matched With Studies Based on Profile

When signing up, users will be asked to fill in their demographic information and personal preferences. InnitData will then use this information to help match them with studies, and provide them with a personalized experience.

Use Filters to Search Through Studies

An essential part of the participant experience is helping them find studies easily using search and filter parameters. By default, users will see their results filtered based on profile and preferences, but they will also have the ability to add additional filters, such as Compensation, Study Type, or Location.

This will help users find more relevant studies and stay engaged with the platform over time.

Apply To Qualifying Studies

A big part of this experience is making sure that researchers get a large number of qualified applicants. To help with this, InnitData uses saved data to make sure that these qualified applicants can apply to any study they are interested in as easily as possible.

Conclusion

Lessons + Next Steps

We’ve seen a massive evolution of the product. We started with a single goal of recruiting participants to aid in research and pivoted to a wholistic approach that solves multiple pain points and meets market demand. The feedback from our cohort and interested researchers and participants has been promising, reaffirming our decision to move towards a wholistic platform.

In the process of designing the MVP, we have created a visual system, icons, components and copy, and general style rules, which will make it easier for us to implement new pages and features in the future.

Looking ahead, we will prioritize these features on future builds of InnitData - User profiles, Communication between users/researchers, Inbuilt survey and screening tool, and real time analytics.