Philips /
Radiology Workspace

Radiologists were reading more exams, in bigger teams, across software from different vendors that did not talk to each other. Information reached them fragmented, while the tools made an already demanding job harder.

The brief was to migrate the product to Philips’ new design language. We observed and interviewed radiologists in hospitals in the United States and Germany, then mapped the product’s functionality, components and workflows before designing.

The research made the opportunity clear: the work needed to go beyond a visual update.

We treated the migration as a redesign of each workflow. Every workflow was rebuilt from field research and validated with Philips clinical specialists and external customers before it went to development.

We split workflows into features so engineering could deliver and improve the system in steps. Issues were prioritised from what users said in sessions: high, medium, low and nice to have. Each feature carried a reference to the source of its requirement.

Seven main features went through more than 30 remote validation sessions, each lasting 45 minutes. We identified and fixed 170 interface problems before development, including 40 high-priority issues.

The errors were spent in prototypes rather than discovered by radiologists after launch. Of more than 50 bugs reported at launch, two concerned design or usability.

More than ten products had their own worklists, with different design languages and interaction patterns. I co-created a shared module with designers in the United States, Brazil, the Netherlands, Israel and Bangalore.

We ranked features by how many products used them, rather than by who asked first. Filtering was common to almost every worklist, so it came first. Creating a worklist from scratch was needed by two products, so it waited.

This was leadership beyond my immediate team: building agreement around shared needs and making the resulting patterns useful across products.

The module’s documentation lived on the official Philips design language hub, supported by a Sketch library on GitHub, collaborative documentation in Confluence, an interactive prototype, a component walkthrough video and validation reports.

Designers in other businesses could start a worklist without going through me. Requests from other products fed a backlog that was reprioritised by how widely each need was shared and how urgent it was.

The lasting contribution was not just a redesigned workspace. It was a set of shared components, guidelines and evidence that other teams could build on.