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Summary – Launching a project without Product Discovery risks budget overruns, regulatory non-compliance, and mixed user adoption. The approach combines field interviews and on-site observations, ROI-risk-effort mapping, low-fidelity prototyping, and early testing to uncover real needs, prioritize features, and validate technical feasibility and compliance.
Solution: hold short, user- and regulation-focused workshops to cut risks, control costs, and deliver a useful, adopted product.
Product Discovery is the key to avoiding a “blind” project launch and concentrating your investments on high-value features. In the healthcare sector, this approach helps mitigate regulatory and user risks through early, iterative field validations.
By placing the user at the heart of the process and combining UX, technical, business, and compliance perspectives, you quickly identify real needs and eliminate unverified internal assumptions. The result is a useful, adopted, and compliant product whose development remains agile and financially controlled.
Understanding Users with a Pragmatic Field Approach
User research isn’t limited to theoretical surveys. It relies on targeted interviews, concrete observations, and an analysis of real constraints.
In a digital patient record project, conducting short field interviews captures caregivers’ frustrations and availability constraints. This approach goes beyond a simple meeting-room questionnaire: it integrates into rounds, briefings, and informal breaks.
Observing the current use of existing tools often uncovers unofficial workarounds. These in-situ observations help explain why certain “non-compliant” practices persist and enable you to build workflows truly adapted to the hospital context.
Analyzing internal and external constraints—such as administrative burden, staff rotation, or GDPR requirements—immediately guides priorities. These operational factors directly influence technical feasibility and the overall user experience. IT specifications.
Understanding security protocols, GDPR requirements, or internal validation processes is crucial for aligning the design. These elements guide design and architecture from the discovery phase.
Short, Targeted Field Interviews
Focused interviews on specific scenarios provide immediate feedback on users’ real needs. They typically last 30 to 45 minutes to avoid encroaching on medical time.
Conducted with diverse profiles (nurses, doctors, pharmacists), these exchanges reveal divergent expectations and highlight convergence opportunities. For example, a nurse may need a concise alert while a pharmacist wants a detailed history.
Observing Actual Usage
Shadowing a user during their movements helps identify friction points that remain unheard during interviews. This reveals uncovered areas or time-consuming detours.
These observation moments uncover everyday actions, makeshift workarounds, and informal detours that signal gaps in current systems. These insights immediately translate into UX and technical improvement opportunities.
Documenting user journeys with photos and annotations contextualizes each usage phase, facilitating the creation of prototypes centered on real needs rather than idealized processes.
Analyzing Operational Constraints
Understanding security protocols, GDPR requirements, or internal validation processes is crucial for aligning the design. These elements guide design and architecture from the discovery phase.
Factoring in team availability, IT maintenance windows, and integration constraints with existing systems prevents unusable developments. This way, technical feasibility is assessed in advance.
A university hospital adjusted its deployment schedule by aligning Product Discovery workshops with caregiver rotations. This example shows that identifying availability windows is as critical as determining needs.
Generating and Prioritizing Ideas Based on Business Value
Co-creation workshops must remain short, focused, and decision-oriented. Prioritization is done through mapping features based on ROI, risks, and effort.
In a co-creation session, each idea is compared in terms of its impact on the value chain and its technical complexity. This method prevents feature bloat and encourages stakeholder buy-in. Should you create an MVP?
Low-fidelity prototyping (paper mock-ups or interactive wireframes) fuels discussion and supports quick decisions. Unvalidated intuitions give way to quantified and compared options. Understanding prototypes.
The resulting functional mapping is structured along three axes: user-perceived value, risk level (technical, regulatory, operational), and development effort. This visual overview immediately guides stakeholders.
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Short, Efficient Workshops
Keeping workshops to a half-day maximizes focus and avoids unproductive debates. Each session begins with a recap of field insights and ends with clear priorities.
Having the executive committee, business leaders, and IT representatives present is essential. The clash of perspectives accelerates decision-making and strengthens ownership of the action plan.
Rapid Low-Fidelity Prototyping
Using tools like Figma or paper mock-ups enables testing multiple versions within hours. You explore several hypotheses without heavy investment.
Each low-fidelity prototype focuses on key journeys and critical screens. Users promptly validate or reject navigation, wording, and element placement choices.
These early feedback cycles feed a backlog prioritized and justified by evidence. This avoids developing features whose value hasn’t been proven.
ROI, Risk, and Effort Mapping
Each feature is positioned on a three-dimensional matrix: business value, technical complexity, and risk level. This consolidated view guides trade-offs.
High-impact, low-effort initiatives rise to the top, while high-risk or low-return options are postponed or deprioritized.
A Swiss pharmaceutical lab abandoned a visually appealing but underused advanced analytics module. This mapping-driven decision saved over 25% of the initial development budget, demonstrating that prioritizing business value limits unnecessary expenses.
Prototyping and UX: Test Early to Focus on What Matters
Interactive prototypes tested from day one quickly reveal journey inconsistencies. Design focuses on accessibility, compliance, and seamless integration with business workflows.
Wireframes are designed to validate the most critical use scenarios. Each iteration incorporates user test feedback, ensuring the UI robustly supports operational processes. High-fidelity wireframe guide.
The interactive prototype measures task completion times, identifies error sources, and refines navigation before a single line of code is written.
The emphasis is on information architecture and visual simplicity: the goal is a task success rate above 90% in the first test cycle.
Wireframes and Use Case Scenarios
Wireframes are developed to illustrate key journeys. They integrate healthcare-specific regulatory constraints, such as capturing consent and action traceability.
Each scenario focuses on a critical task: creating a patient record, prescribing treatment, or reviewing histories. Tests rely on short but reproducible protocols.
Initial feedback often highlights minor tweaks—button placement, labels—that greatly enhance ergonomics and execution speed.
Early Interactive Testing
Offering the prototype to a caregiver panel and measuring interactions in real conditions uncovers ergonomic errors. Task completion time, error rates, and qualitative comments are analyzed.
These tests also reveal users’ emotional expectations—crucial in a patient context. They highlight needs for immediate feedback or visual confirmation.
An outpatient care center reduced administrative data entry time by 30% after two test cycles. This example demonstrates the tangible impact of early UX iteration.
Accessible, Compliant, and Scalable Design
Design takes accessibility standards (WCAG) and MDR UX/Use-Safety requirements into account. Each screen is validated for contrast, readability, and keyboard navigation.
The prototype’s modular structure makes adding or modifying components easy without disrupting existing journeys. This ensures controlled scalability.
The hybrid approach—open-source building blocks and custom modules—ensures technological freedom and limits vendor lock-in while providing a secure, scalable foundation.
Evaluation, Testing, and Proof of Utility
Validation unfolds across three axes: desirability, feasibility, and business alignment. Operational risk analysis and regulatory compliance are systematically integrated.
After prototyping, the testing phase includes extreme scenarios and human error simulations. This verifies that the tool remains reliable even under misuse or overload. IT project governance.
Predictive performance tests measure scalability and technical robustness before final implementation. They anticipate load peaks and ensure service stability. Total cost of ownership.
Finally, IT feasibility is validated through a high-level architectural review, ensuring cohesion with the existing ecosystem and identifying critical integration points.
UX and Technical Validation
The prototype is presented to an end-user panel to measure satisfaction and ease of use. Quantitative and qualitative feedback feed a recommendations report.
Meanwhile, the technical team assesses feasibility through lightweight proofs of concept, validating architecture decisions, APIs, and key components.
This dual perspective ensures the promised experience is technically feasible without budget overruns or major delays.
Regulatory and IT Compatibility
In the medical field, MDR compliance and UX/Use-Safety requirements impose strict constraints. Each requirement is mapped and validated before development.
The high-level architecture review secures integration with existing IT systems: ERP, electronic health records (EHR), directories, and secure messaging solutions.
This upfront verification prevents delays and aligns deployment schedules with regulatory approval windows and IT maintenance cycles.
Move from Uncertainty to Product Certainty
Product Discovery provides a clear vision of what to build, what not to build, and what to prioritize. By combining field research, rapid prototyping, and multi-faceted evaluations, you limit risks, control costs, and foster strong alignment between business and IT.
When healthcare and compliance are at the core of the project, this pragmatic approach helps avoid critical errors, shorten time to market, and ensure sustainable user adoption.
Our experts are here to guide you in implementing an accelerated, flexible approach perfectly tailored to your organization’s size and challenges.
