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Due to strict confidentiality agreements, I can’t showcase the user interfaces for these projects. Instead, this case study pulls back the curtain on my practical process and a breakdown of what I did.
Medical instruments don't get redesigned from scratch very often. When they do, it's usually because the world changed faster than the hardware could keep up.During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals needed to run far more diagnostic tests than the original QIAstat-Dx instrument could handle.
QIAGEN's response was QIAstat-Dx Rise a higher-throughput version capable of processing up to 160 samples per day. A bigger instrument meant a bigger screen, a more complex workflow, and a fully redesigned touchscreen interface.
Every interaction should get the operator in and out as quickly as possible.
Critical status and progress information needs to be visible at a glance, not buried.
Loading samples is one of the most frequent tasks — it needed the fewest possible steps.
Decisions on RISE weren’t just for RISE — alongside other UX designers, the work needed to feed into a shared design system used across QIAGEN’s other instruments.
Going in, we had two assumptions about the new instrument that needed checking — and a current instrument’s worth of problems to understand. We started by testing the original instrument ourselves, working through real use cases, before moving into formal interviews with laboratory operators.
Operators work with the instrument wearing protective gloves at all times. Would this reduce tap precision and rule out interactions that depend on fine motor control?
The new RISE instrument would have a significantly higher screen position than the original, with operators interacting standing, without arm support — would this matter?
Confirm or challenge our assumptions about how gloves and the new elevated screen position would affect operators in practice.
Understand what worked and what didn’t in the current QIAstat-Dx interface from the perspective of people using it every day
Learn how the lab environment and operator workflow actually looked — the physical conditions, the routines, the interruptions
Research findings pointed to a structural problem, not just a visual one: the screen needed fixed zones that held steady regardless of what task an operator was performing.
The research findings — combined with the known constraints and requirements — translated into a clear set of design principles for the new interface.
Testing in a regulated environment isn't optional — it's structured into the process. Before anything reached clinical users, we validated decisions through formal usability studies that matched the risk level of the product.
Testing happened in QIAGEN’s on-site instrument lab — on real hardware, not a simulator or a clickable prototype on a laptop. A usability test on a screen doesn’t surface the same issues as one conducted standing at an elevated instrument, gloves on, under the physical conditions operators actually work in.
Participants were internal staff playing the role of laboratory operators. The project was confidential during development, which ruled out external recruitment — a practical constraint that’s common in competitive medical device work.
The core test scenario was built around a representative task: loading a run and monitoring its progress. The design decisions held up under testing, with a few content and interaction gaps surfacing and getting fixed before wider rollout.
The QIAstat-DX Rise interface didn't exist in isolation. From the start, design decisions were made with the wider instrument portfolio in mind — building toward consistency across devices, not just solving for one screen.
QIAGEN was building a shared design system to span its entire instrument portfolio, and the patterns developed for RISE fed directly into that system rather than staying specific to one device.
Regular cross-team sessions brought together UX designers working across different instruments to discuss their work, surface patterns worth generalising, and define components that could work across devices rather than just within one product.