Erdmann Solutions – Human Centered Design for Pharma

Erdmann Solutions is a champion of Human-Centered Design (HCD) concepts that have been successfully applied across the pharma and life sciences industries to create successful and award-winning design solutions and product success.

These concepts have been particularly useful in the development of Medtech devices where key success factors are usability, patient experience, and practitioner acceptance.

Erdmann’s experience design approach, expertise and insights can produce more effective and faster-to-market solutions for operation rooms, diagnostic user interfaces, screen designs, surgical instruments and systems, wearable devices and home use medical devices.

What is Human Centered Design?

Professor Don Norman,  Director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego, and author of The Design of Everyday Things has defined HCD thus:

“Human-centered design is a practice where designers focus on four key aspects. They focus on people and their context. They seek to understand and solve the right problems, the root problems. They understand that everything is a complex system with interconnected parts. Finally, they do small interventions. They continually prototype, test and refine their products and services to ensure that their solutions truly meet the needs of the people they focus on.”

Human centered design is a basic requirement in Medtech for successful market introduction where ready acceptance by end-users is a criterion.

New medical products may only be launched on the market if the entire development process, including all analysis and design steps (e.g. rapid prototyping) has been recorded in a usability file (DIN standard EN 62366). The standard requires detailed documentation of all planning steps, designs, prototypes and their test results.

Erdmann Solutions HCD skills

Erdmann Solutions is a holistic design agency, which means it places analysis of context and intended product use at the very start of the development process and interrogates all assumptions rigorously. This approach takes in disciplines such as:

• Patient journey mapping
• Workflow mapping
• User experience mapping
• User acceptance
• Usability testing

Attractive design, action-guiding user interfaces and software ergonomics are all important but only part of the total design answer. Ultimately, questions of specific, practice-oriented product and user qualities – acceptance and credibility – are decisive for market success or failure.

Erdmann Solutions ’s portfolio of design skills and capabilities include corporate branding User Experience (UX) design, instruction for use (IfU) design, , and liaison with medical/life science professionals.

In short, Erdmann can connect with the original Big Idea in pharma technology, test it against existing experience and shape it into a deliverable and marketable solution.

Resources

Click on Experience Mapping for Human Centered Design to download PDF.
Click on Erdmann Design thinking as a standard for pharma design brochure. Erdmann Design thinking as a standard.