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Design: UX/UI, Visual Design

At a Glance

When Stryker’s Advanced Guidance Technologies division was looking to update their navigation system with new equipment and code, they also took the opportunity to assess the platform’s user experience to ensure future scalability of technologies and procedure types.

They partnered with us to assess their platform's efficiency, scalability, and usability for 3 products across spine and cranial domains as well as 3 tracking technologies – electromagnetic, optical active and optical passive. We applied our insights to improve cranial biopsy and shunt procedures while also designing a new biopsy arm workflow.

The Challenge

Surgical navigation technology requires a complex setup process and specific surgical steps. Many OR teams find the navigation taxing and often require a Stryker rep to be present to help operate the equipment. Surgeons needed a massively simplified and seamless experience that made the most complex brain surgery technology feel like an easy, must-have staple for their operating rooms. Our new design needed to be centered around learnability and efficiency, to enable technicians to use the system confidently with minimal errors that could prolong surgery time and compromise safety.

Our task was to revolutionize the biopsy arm software and hardware experience, making it irresistibly smooth, reliable, and compelling. The goal? To boost sales of complete navigation systems and rival robotic alternatives.

We took a procedure driven approach to the system design, meeting with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and users (reps, surgeons, and nurses) to note their needs and pain points. Our designers meticulously mapped out the process for two cranial procedures, along the way identifying user needs, time inefficiencies, and points of confusion to inform the design.

How We Did It

Over the course of 2 years, we completed 9 rounds of design and research, speaking with nurses 43 times and surgeons over 52 times. Testing early and often was critical to our success. Putting each iteration in front of these user groups ensured design changes saw marked improvements at each stage and were moving us toward the end goal.

Through early conversations, we discovered the linear flow of the current cranial offering didn’t align with the way users work. While the procedure itself is linear, the setup is more convoluted, and each role needed the ability to jump into their tasks as needed. This critical insight resulted in a complete shift in the navigation model to have a dashboard that captures setup status and launches task-based setup pages for each user. Once setup is complete, the procedure can begin, transitioning seamlessly to an interface with a singular, optimized flow.

The
Outcomes

Our final design resulted in significant changes to Stryker’s CranialMap software, flipping its structure to better match the unique process of each user and simplify the entire process. By introducing the dashboard approach, we achieved a more flexible and modular setup process with easy launch points to common features across procedure types.

Once a procedure is started, the interface transitions to a highly specialized procedure flow, optimized for efficiency and ease of use to ensure safe, repeatable outcomes. In total, our redesign streamlined 26 features and 2 procedures. It successfully simplified the design from:

7 steps to 5 steps
28 clicks to 16 minimal clicks
8 pages to 4 pages

Beyond simplification, the new framework allowed for customized procedure visualizations that made the surgeons task clearer and easier to perform. Our procedural framework changes were further expanded on in additional projects with Stryker's Spine and Robotics Assisted Surgery (RAS) teams. Our work with Stryker on cranial guidance software has been approved by the FDA and is currently on the market.

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