Royalty Pharma is a company who focuses on drug investment How it usually works is that the analysis team receives applications and conducts due diligence (research&analysis) to determine if it's a good investment.
For the applications on the similar drugs/targets. The analysis team has not developed a good way to reuse past researches. This plug in is really to help the team to recycle materials on a similar research and save their time.
The team conducted interviews with a few analysts and asked them to walk through their process of doing due diligence. A few key things we want to distill from the meetings are:
Based on the interviews, I mapped out their journey to better understand their workflow and pain points. While I was doing the journey map, I was also able to distill some insights in opportunities.
Persona
The project requires the design team and data team to work closely to solve users problems. For a better understanding of stakeholders' needs and how to improve the due diligence process from the design perspective, I created a persona to better frame goals, needs, and pain points.
Design Constraints
Meeting stakeholders' goals and needs is definitely the key of this design. However, the design is also impacted by the data model and technical constraints. The team is comprised of data engineers, designers, and developers. We worked closely throughout the entire project and set up plans in the early.
What can users search for?
The data team worked closely with the analysis team on identifying what to extract in the past materials. This is very important since it shapes what users can search for. in the long run, it also shapes the list of features in design.
The items determined that analysts would need when reusing materials are: slides, images, and publications.
Is there any constraints in development?
I worked with the front-end developer on reviewing MS powerpoint plugin documentations to identify the technical constraints. Gladly, there were some recommendations but not really something definitely we cannot do. The developer finally decided to go with typescript framework.
We explored different options while figuring out technical constraints and compare their pros and cons.
Search is the most complicated part of the plug in because it determines what and how users can get in results. I worked on multiple schemes that can be summarized into three concepts.
Concept 1 - Real-time research updates (search and results on the same page)
Pros: users get real-time update when revising search criteria.
Cons: slow down the search and the space for results is limited.
Concept 2 - Query builder (search and results are separated)
Pros: can accommodate more search criteria without putting too much pressure on the APIs.
Cons: users have to go back every time updating the search.
Concept 3 - Search by following the prompts
Pros: provide clear instructions.
Cons: may hard to track search criteria in the search bar.
We decided to go with concept 2 because:
The key design consideration for the result browsing page are: 1. how can users scroll. 2. do we want to support multiple views.
Concept 1 - Unlimited scrolling
Concept 2 - Pagination
We decided to go with unlimited scrolling because:
Multiple views?
We discussed providing multiple views to allow users to choose their ways to browse results (large, small, extra small etc). However, the developer declined due to the technical difficulty.
The design consideration around insert is whether we want to support multiple inserts of the search results and how the flow is when multi-selecting.
Concept 1 - Multiple inserts
Concept 2 - Single insert
We decided to go with single insert because:
Search by file type, project, and key tags.
The users will follow prompts to set up search criteria step by step.
Refine the search
Mentions
Users are allowed to get to desired results faster by selecting files that contains any type of tags including target, indication, drug, company, clinical trial, and keywords.
Date range
Users are allowed to get desired results faster by selecting files that contains any type of tags.
Other elements
Users can refine the search containing other elements such as images for slides.
Infinite scrolling
Users can infinitely scroll and insert a slide/image/publication.
Static search summary
The search summary will display on top statically for users to go back to search and visit search criteria anytime.
Users can go back to the home page to revise results and clear by one click.
Collaboration on understanding the data model and limitations of Microsoft plugin is very important for this one. We as a team spent a lot of time on figuring out the constraints and how we balance that with what client asked for before we dive into design.