YEAR
2023
COMPANY
GSK
ROLE
Product Designer
INDUSTRY
Biopharma
SUMMARY
I led the design for an essential application for GSK that allows scientist to document, track, and collaborate during the drug discovery phase, allowing senior level leadership stakeholders taking strategic data-driven decision faster.
The result has help achieved estimated £9 billion in cost savings for the company by enabling streamlined processes and facilitated a more efficient way of working.
device
Desktop
PLATFORM
Web
Background
Drug discovery is a long process, it may take years to complete and on average it took around 10-15 years of hard work from initial concept to market approval. During this discovery phase one of the process that needs to be taken is documentation, present the experiments findings to the relevant stakeholders, and for leadership team to make an informed strategic decision. This process involved a lot of manual work and different applications which is time consuming and it is hard to see the progress for each drug discovery process, this is where the team see an opportunity to develop application that can help streamline that process.
My Role
I work as a Product Designer for a product under the R&D Departments. I work along with UI/UX Designer and Business Analyst and also with the Product Director. When I joined the company, I was backfilling the Principal Product Designer position. My role is not only designing the interface but also being involved in user requirements gathering along with Product Director and Business Analyst. When I joined the company, the product is already launched however still need a constant improvement and more features is required to be added to address the business needs. So the focus is not completely redesign the application, rather designing new features and keep iterating on the product.
Users
Scientist
Project Lead
Product Director
Leadership Team (Board of Directors, VPs)
Constraints
As a designer it is always tempting to redesign everything and make everything look better, however it is not always the case. One of the constraints is I cannot easily make extreme changes to the UI, however I can suggest improvement but still in a way that doesn't take too much time to develop, because there are other constraints which are time constraints and feature prioritisation based on the business side. So the conclusions, the constraints are as follows:
Time / Timeline
Prioritisation
Team capacity
Technical constraints
Design system / Brand guideline
Design Process
The process might differ from case to case, however the usual design process starts from the Product Director get a request or seen an opportunity from the business side, and then Product Director or Business Analyst connect with me to discuss the initial background and how do we want to do with the product as per incoming business needs. After the requirements is gathered and we understand the needs better, I started to create the initial design concept using Figma and after that go back to the Product Director or discuss it with Business Analyst to get some initial thought and feedback before we present that to the users.
Designs
Below are some design from the applications.
Project Overview
The first thing the user see when opening a project is a Sunburst view which is the visualisation on the progress of the project. User can switch to different view based on the needs, each view options is tailored toward specific goals and needs. This view allows user to be flexible on how they want to see the project.
Question Detail and Task Assignment
Project Lead can assign a specific question task to the members
Medicine Profile
Medicine Profile is one of the key component from the application, this is the summary of the drug that is currently being developed, I helped designed the Medicine Profile along with Product Director. User can export the Medicine Profile into a PDF.
Portfolio View and Project Dashboard
The Leadership team needs info and data to make an informed and strategic decision, portfolio view and project dashboard allow the user to see the whole project under a helicopter view and take a decision accordingly.
