Applied Technical Systems Inc. (ATS) is proud to submit a prototype redesign of the current FDA Medwatch website. The prototype can be found at: http://labs.atsid.com/18f-RFQ993471-POOL1/, and we've provided a summary of how we met the Pool One Technical Approach requirements.
Our project plan for this prototype followed an iterative approach, combining the tenets of Lean Start-Up and Agile Development.
Our team was made up of six members with a range of backgrounds and experiences. Rick Lee was selected to be the leader and Product Manager for the prototype development. In this role he prioritized deliverables, directed actions for each Sprint, held team members accountable, and was held accountable to ensure a quality prototype was submitted on time.
Initially, we looked at how the FDA's existing sites correlated with the datasets identified with this challenge, which led us to discover Medwatch. We then researched what Medwatch does for the public, talked to medical experts, brainstormed how users interact with the website and looked for relationships between Medwatch search results and data on Open.FDA.gov, leading us to perform more customer research. After determining the data closely aligned with the Medwatch data, we decided to redesign the page with a responsive design.
We first brainstormed possible redesign ideas, developed user questions, and went out to interview members of the public, both inside ATS and outside ATS. We also engaged a medical expert, who gave us great insights into how both professionals and the public engage with the FDA and Medwatch.
This user feedback effort resulted in 50+ responses. Feedback showed that most interviewees did not know of Medwatch or had never considered using the FDA as a source for this information. Interviewees preferred to contact their physician or pharmacist to get recall or adverse effect information on medicines they are taking. News outlets were also a popular choice to receive this information. Interviewees expressed interest in receiving notifications of recalls on mobile devices via personalized alerts.
While gathering this initial customer information and developing our first wireframes the team began to define the modern and open-source front end/client-side web technologies to use (ensuring they were openly licensed and free of charge) and our selected design style guide and/or pattern library. For our development tools we utilized AngularJS, JQuery, Bootstrap, Angular-UI & UI-Router, RaphaelJS, Less.JS, HTML5, CSS3, Snazzy Maps, AngularJS-Toaster and Google Maps Javascript API. Our team also chose to utilize the USPTO pattern library (which ATS helped develop) as the foundation for many of the individual components used in our prototype.
As we developed our wireframes, the team decided to conduct a Focus Group following Sprint 1. The feedback from the focus group showed that our initial idea for a personalized Medwatch page would go nowhere with the public. This was a result of users not wanting to provide personal medical information to the Federal Government. This caused our team to pivot to a new design concept: providing a multi-page, search-based workflow. We focused on this approach in Sprint 2 and Sprint 3.
In keeping with our strategy of having user feedback to understand what people need by engaging them in the design process, we conducted one-on-one user/usability tests with three ATS employees after the end of Sprint 4, using qualitative testing using materials and techniques developed by Steve Krug. This, and future usability tests ensured we had a consistent flow of user information to guide our design work.
Based on feedback, we pivoted before Sprint 5 to move from a multi-page design to a dashboard and mobile concept motivated by Zillow with phone-only data tracking. This new single-page application provided a solution localized for the user, which we implemented during Sprint 6. The goal of the mobile application was to address consumer pain points, specifically, remembering to take and manage medications for a whole family.
At the end of Sprint 7 we conducted one final user test with a design expert that caused our last major pivot within our design. We conducted another round of public testing through our mobile prototype. Overall, the team used numerous human-centered design techniques or tools throughout the project lifecycle.
Before submission of our prototype after the end of Sprint 8 the team made sure the prototype worked on multiple devices and was responsive and created sufficient documentation to install and run the prototype on another machine via the DeveloperREADME. We also solidified our project backlog and ensured all artifacts were present in our GitHub repository, which we encourage you to explore.
Licensed under Apache 2.0.