What do you think a sketch is worth?
If you ask companies with design at the forefront of their success, visualization generates outstanding returns. Proper visualization, coupled with brand strategy, is critical in producing a holistic device and contributes to a product's overall longevity and success.
Accurate sketches and visual renderings are paramount to creating products that will achieve commercial success. For companies that want their devices to have an impact, visualization is priceless.
Industrial Designer II
A visual is versatile, but at its core, it captures the seed of an idea. The link from a mental concept to an accurate representation is what we could consider visualization.
Visualization is a method to lend characteristics such as dimension and form to abstract and formless concepts that live only in thought.
For example, our Design Team at Biotex works with our customers and clinicians to explore every option until their vision is realized. For a specific product, visuals such as sketches are a foundational building block that can inform a product’s practical use and appeal.
Our Design Team uses visual experimentation and cognitive modeling to explore the physical conditions and interactions a product could encounter. Visual experimentation allows us to ask important questions, identify risks, and explore solutions to mitigate them. This part of the process enables decision-makers to visualize outcomes before implementation and perform trial and error.
High-volume visual experimentation and high-fidelity physical models advance innovation by minimizing the risk of unexpected challenges. These techniques also speed up the innovation cycle by allowing us to assess manufacturing feasibility and decrease material waste and feature creep, which help streamline development and reduce costs.
At Biotex, our approach to visual experimentation is broad and multifaceted. If you work with us, we’ll help you generate and test ideas to develop viable solutions suited to your needs, contributing to your product’s success.
A sketch is only as good as the information that it intends to capture. How do we ensure we have all the information we need for a successful product design?
You need a design team that will collaborate with you by researching your needs, listening to the voices of your customers, and exploring every idea through rapid and iterative visualization. As visualization is the prototype or experiment on an idea, the team should use sketching to avoid mistakes and forecast the product development process.
If you’re a business, entrepreneur, or medical device developer, this is how our team at Biotex will collaborate with you to visualize the right product.
Our Design Team will:
Seek your input
Gather your thoughts on the challenges you aim to address, the solutions you want to explore, and your desired end-game
Give dimension and purpose to your input through multiple rounds of sketching
Remember, a sketch is a visual representation, but it’s also an exercise in how well we listen to your needs. It’s an integral part of our collaborative process, which helps us:
Map out user journeys
Identify risks and vulnerabilities before they become critical issues
Visualize the entire user experience to ensure all touchpoints are considered and optimized
In addition to guiding a product’s development, visualization can also serve other purposes, including:
Scenario Planning
Sketching is part of an iterative prototyping process.
By sketching out different scenarios, teams can identify potential risks and refine their approaches before investing significant resources. In scenario planning, the aim is to explore the qualities of a given design and exchange ideas to grow the pool of designs and the probability of a superior form factor.
Starting with a broad and exploratory approach, the key is exploring the innumerable design permutations that can render a viable solution. As we discuss the design with you, our visual experimentation becomes focused on a design suitable for higher-fidelity visual representations such as renderings or 3-D CAD.
By breaking down your needs and wants, our Design Team focuses on ideation to address the key drivers of a product's performance, safety, and efficacy.
Task Analysis
Visualizing the touch points for a product is crucial to understanding how to improve its packaging, ergonomics, sterility, and performance features.
Sketching is valuable in creating storyboards that depict the sequence of user interactions and tasks. It aids in task analysis, allowing us to identify potential challenges and areas for improvement in the user experience.
What is storyboarding?
Storyboarding is a pivotal part of the design process because it visualizes the contact points of any given product at a certain point on the journey to the end of use.
A visual timeline that breaks down scenarios into components, storyboarding follows the product’s journey to better identify tasks, environments, workflow, touchpoints, user experience, and user interaction. It allows the design team to test assumptions against expert opinion and uncover insights that lead to design improvements, which is especially beneficial in developing medical devices, where understanding the context of use is critical for creating effective and safe solutions.
What is task analysis?
Task analysis is integral to medical device development and is used as part of formative and summative evaluation studies. In the context of a medical device, the analysis of every use, step, and interaction a product will encounter is essential to understanding the user workflow and life of a product before and after use. Our documentation of tasks and users is the foundation for usability testing in later phases of development.
Human Interface, Contextual Visualization, and User-Centered Design
Sketching is an essential tool in the user-centered design process, where designers prioritize the needs and preferences of the end-users. By incorporating sketching into the design process with a focus on human factors, designers can create products and interfaces that are more intuitive, user-friendly, and aligned with the characteristics and needs of the intended users.
Sketching supports human factors engineering by allowing designers to explore ergonomic considerations and user interactions. Sketches can also depict how users interact with the device, helping identify and address potential usability issues.
Regulatory Documentation
Sketches can serve as visual documentation of discussions around risks and mitigation strategies, including identifying areas where safety concerns and usability issues may arise, allowing for proactive risk assessment and mitigation strategies. This visual record can be referred to later, ensuring that decisions and plans are not lost or misunderstood over time.
Your design team must ensure visual references are stored and maintained to comply with regulatory requirements. Sketches can be included in regulatory documentation to visually illustrate the design and functionality of medical devices, which is particularly useful when communicating complex technical concepts to regulatory bodies.
Intellectual Property
The competitive advantage of a company’s innovation is wrapped up in intellectual property assets, and visual documentation is one way to keep you protected. By maintaining a visual record of authorship and dates, intellectual property is captured on file to keep you protected when filing for patents.
For example, our Design Team has a unique early visualization process where we capture the design in detail and from various angles. This process is vital in translating the product across the development phases. We also take pride in creating precision visuals that will translate across the development process and ensure that designs are captured as intended. Our sketches and visual elements are treated as original creations and, under certain jurisdictions, are considered eligible for copyright protection. This process, in turn, informs the line art, which eventually becomes the preferred form of documenting a patent submission and which must incorporate all of the unique aspects of the design.
Aesthetics
Consumer understanding of good design has evolved, and today, it is imperative that a design process take into account the discerning eye and touch of knowledgeable users. That is why aesthetic value creation is explored early through sketching with an end to balance utility and desirability.
Your design team’s visual experimentation should focus on lending every functional aspect of a design toward enhancing optimal user interactions, considering many factors such as surfacing, texture, shape, color, and other details. It’s in these innumerable small decisions that aesthetic value and customer satisfaction are created.
Our approach to visualization at Biotex is just one of the ways we help our customers and clients develop innovative products that address real-world needs. Through the application of our methodology, we’ll guide you through the risks and opportunities in a product’s design and use.
If you’re interested in getting started with your visualization journey or learning more about our design process, please get in touch with us, and we’ll set a time to discuss your project.
Pedro Medina is an Industrial Designer II at Biotex, Inc., where he collaborates with clients to design innovative medical devices, healthcare products, and branding. He enjoys the process of bringing ideas to life and working on improving human health. Pedro has been working at Biotex for over a year and is excited to contribute to the healthcare community in his hometown.
