Field Testing - (ADLM) Clinical Lab Expo
My Role:Overview
The Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM) Clinical Lab Expo takes place annually worldwide, bringing together leading companies that focus on medical diagnostics devices and solutions. The conference was held at the San Diego, California convention center and hosted 6,000 attendees from around the world. Our team established a digital innovation station to introduce customers to the website redesign. At prescheduled times, customers participated in a study that showcased the new sections and provided direct feedback on their experience.
The Challenge
Traditional user research presents significant challenges for specialized B2B companies like Beckman Coulter. Finding qualified participants is often costly and time-consuming, especially when requiring specialized participants from the laboratory and diagnostics industry. Conducting authentic real-world scenarios becomes difficult in artificial testing environments, while validating prototypes with actual target users requires extensive coordination and resources. Additionally, synthesizing participant feedback into iterative prototype improvements often creates lengthy development cycles that delay product launches.
Core Challenges:
- High costs and complexity of recruiting specialized laboratory professionals for testing
- Limited access to target users for prototype validation
- Time-intensive feedback synthesis and implementation cycles
- Need for rapid iteration before scheduled product launches
The Process
Customer feedback was essential throughout the website redesign process, ensuring the final product met our target audience's needs and expectations.
Key Process Elements:
- Developed a prototype to capture customer feedback on the original design
- Conducted a formative study to pressure-test the prototype with MVP (minimum viable product)
- Identified key design flaws, particularly in search capabilities and navigation taxonomy
- Synthesized findings for the leadership and development team
- Created real-world testing scenarios within the conference environment
The Outcome
Participants completed a series of task-based scenarios, with two focused on general feedback as everyday users of Beckman Coulter's website. The findings informed critical design decisions before the scheduled website launch. During the usability testing, we captured user friction points and success rates from over 50 participants. The study captured user reactions to the design and proposed functionality through systematic data collection methods.
Key Results:
- Successfully recruited 50+ specialized participants at a fraction of traditional research costs
- Gathered authentic feedback in a real-world environment
- Identified critical design flaws in search capabilities and navigation taxonomy before development
- Enabled rapid synthesis and implementation of findings ahead of scheduled go-live
- Validated prototype functionality with actual target users
Design Insights:
Through this project, I learned that specialized participants can be costly and challenging to recruit, making field testing at industry events a valuable alternative approach. Healthcare environments are highly regulated, requiring careful consideration of compliance and user workflows in design decisions. Empathy proved crucial in the early stages of the user journey, as understanding the specific pressures and contexts of laboratory professionals directly informed better design solutions.
Additionally, repeated testing in low-fidelity stages significantly reduced development cycles by identifying critical issues before costly implementation. I discovered that effective sample sizes can vary and often smaller, focused subsets of specialized users can provide more actionable insights than larger, general participant groups. This approach proved particularly effective in the healthcare space where quality of feedback outweighed quantity of participants.
