Stepping Into a New World: My First Week Designing for Medical Researchers
Updated: Aug 19
An honest account of vocabulary I didn't know, a domain I didn't expect, and why I can't wait to learn more
I'll be honest, I walked into this knowing it wouldn't be like most products I've worked on. I knew it would be a hard first discovery. I knew it would take more than getting familiar with a few flows.
I just didn't know how different it would be, and somehow, one week in, I'm more excited because of it.
A World With Its Own Language
The first thing that hit me was the vocabulary. Not jargon in the way tech products have jargon. This was different. Words like concept, cohort, phenotype, these aren't labels slapped onto buttons. They're ideas that carry real weight in how medical researchers think, work, and make decisions.
I've been writing them down as I go. My notes this week look less like a UX audit and more like flashcards for a subject I didn't sign up to study.
And the thing is, I have to understand them. Because if I misread what a cohort means to a researcher, I'll design the wrong thing. I already almost did.
Two Types of Researchers I Didn't Know Existed
Think about the word designer. On its own, it tells you almost nothing. A graphic designer, a building designer, an interior designer — same word, completely different worlds, different tools, different ways of thinking about problems. You wouldn't hand them the same brief and expect the same output.
Researcher is the same kind of word. And one of the first things I discovered is that not all researchers using this kind of platform work the same way. There are clinical researchers — often working within a single hospital or institution, with their own patient data, their own context. And then there are network researchers — working across multiple data sources from different sites, thinking about consistency, comparability, and what it means when data from different places says different things.
Same product. Very different mental models of what they're trying to do with it.
And then there's another layer: the difference between a dataset view and a study view. To me, on day one, these felt like two tabs showing the same information. By the end of the week I started to understand they represent two fundamentally different questions a researcher might be asking. I'm not sure I fully get it yet — but I want to. That's kind of the feeling of this whole first week, actually.
Designing for People Who Know More Than Me
Here's the uncomfortable, exciting truth I'm sitting with right now: the people I'm designing for are experts. Deep experts. And I'm not.
In a lot of products, a designer can lean on intuition, you understand the user's world well enough to make calls. Here, I can't do that yet. Every assumption I make needs to be checked. Every design decision needs to be traced back to something a researcher actually told me, not something I guessed.
That's not a bad thing. It's just a different mode. And honestly? It's making me sharper. I'm asking more questions. I'm listening more carefully. I'm not trying to simplify anything before I understand why it's complex in the first place.
What I'm Looking Forward To
I'm at the very beginning of this. There's so much I don't know yet, about how researchers actually move through their workflows day to day, about where the real friction lives versus where I think it does. But that's exactly what I'm here for.
I want to understand their world well enough to make something that actually helps them do their work better. That means more conversations, more questions that probably sound naive, more moments of "oh, that's what that means."
I came into this week expecting to design. Instead, I spent most of it learning, and I think that was exactly right. Week one down. A lot more to go. Can't wait.
This is part of my ongoing portfolio reflections, following my experience in UX/UI for research-focused products.
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