Top 5 medtech UX predictions

Ventec Life Systems, for example, used Crank Storyboard to combine five separate devices into one portable respiratory system for frontline medical professionals fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The development choices and tools they adopted are a model for other manufacturers looking to adapt existing technology or launch products into new markets.

Designing interfaces that look and behave like smartphones

The quality of how people interact with their devices is a key differentiator for product success and the trend is towards higher expectations on medtech UX. Building in rich graphics and pleasing experiences is just as important as patient safety. In fact, these aspects must be taken together when building satisfying GUIs that also prevent improper use or malfunction.

Increasing investment in user experience design

The prior two trends indicate the growing need to push the boundaries of medtech UX, including the support of skills that can do it. While developers are expert at building and integrating software and hardware, UX designers bring user research and experience design techniques to the table, enabling product teams to dramatically improve the quality and competitive position of their devices.

New techniques to get to market quickly

It may seem like delivering modern, intuitive user interfaces that integrate more functionality than ever before is an impossible challenge. The fact is that it isn’t a technology puzzle that needs to be solved, rather a process and tooling one. The manufacturers that win 2024 will be those that embrace both UX design and development and adopt frameworks that enable these different disciplines to work together.

To meet these needs and more, Crank’s Storyboard embedded GUI framework allows designers and developers to build their medtech UX applications in parallel, helping embrace design iterations, enable creation of rich and intuitive experiences, and accelerate development. To meet the needs of the 2024 medtech market, Storyboard eliminates the challenge of managing changes in design that hamper existing development and is compatible with all operating systems and processors, including NXP, STMicroelectronics, and Renesas. Crank, BlackBerry QNX, and Toradex provide more information in this webinar on GUI design and safety in medical devices.

As with any industry, there are many UX challenges for the medtech industry to overcome. The benefits of tools and processes that empower product teams to take advantage of different skill sets and UX design techniques hold much promise. It’s just a matter of who gets to market first.