Designing for Healthcare: What Clinical UX Gets Wrong
Clinical UX design operates under constraints that most digital product designers never encounter — and the cost of getting it wrong is measured in
Working on the LUMA Vision Health Platform — a clinical interface for cardiac catheterisation lab procedures — was the most technically demanding and professionally consequential design project I've worked on. It's also the one that most fundamentally challenged my assumptions about what good UX means.
The Stakes Are Different
In consumer product design, a poor UX decision costs a user time and the business money. In clinical UX, a poor decision can contribute to a patient safety incident. That reality shapes everything — the research process, the design methodology, the testing approach, and the regulatory framework within which the work must be completed.
The LUMA Vision platform needed to comply with IEC 62366 (usability engineering for medical devices) and 21 CFR Part 11 (FDA electronic records and signatures). These aren't optional frameworks — they define the process by which clinical software is developed and approved, and any deviation from them creates regulatory risk that no client is willing to accept.
Research in a Clinical Environment
Conducting user research in a cardiac catheterisation lab is not like conducting user research in an office or a café. The environment is high-pressure, time-critical, and sterile. Observation has to be carefully managed to avoid disrupting clinical workflows. The clinicians you're observing are experts in their domain — cardiologists and cath lab technicians who have highly specific mental models of how their workflows should work.
The research phase on LUMA involved structured observation sessions in working cath labs, contextual interviews with clinical staff, and detailed task analysis of the specific procedures the platform would need to support. The insights from this work couldn't have been gathered any other way — you cannot design a clinical interface without understanding the clinical context.
Safety as a Design Constraint
Every clinical interface carries the risk of use error — a user action that leads to an unintended and potentially harmful outcome. Usability engineering for medical devices is specifically focused on identifying and mitigating these risks: through information architecture that makes critical data immediately visible, through interaction patterns that resist accidental activation of critical functions, and through clear feedback that confirms every consequential action.
On the LUMA platform, the formative usability testing programme — conducted before the final design was locked — measured task completion rates for specific clinical procedures. The improvement from baseline (71%) to post-redesign (94%) wasn't just a UX metric; it was a safety metric.
