Understandingthe challenge
Industry
- Healthcare
- Life sciences
- Clinical trials
Platform
- Mobile (iOS & Android)
Services
- Discovery
- UX design
- Mobile development
- Backend development
Datatrial runs technology for complex, sensitive clinical trials. They wanted a way for the people going through a trial to keep track of their appointments and tell the team how they were feeling, so that experience could shape the trial as it ran.
Two things made it hard. The patients are often seriously ill, so the app had to be gentle and genuinely simple to use. And traditional feedback tends to skew negative, which makes it hard to turn into anything useful. Datatrial had deep data expertise in-house, but not the design and mobile skills to get this right for the people using it.
The hard part was not the data. It was making feedback something a seriously ill person would want to give.
We started with a discovery workshop and mapped the patient journey around real personas, someone partway through cancer or cell therapy, not an average user. That shaped every decision that followed.
Instead of the usual emotive scoring, which nudges people towards the negative, we designed a gentler dot-based way to say how you are feeling, quicker to give and easier to read back. We added a peer-feedback feature so a patient could see reassurance from others before an upcoming session, which matters a great deal when you are anxious about what is next. We built it as a cross-platform app in React Native with a Node.js backend on AWS, to the clinical-compliance standards this kind of work demands.
Designed for the person, built for the trial
The work was Innovate UK backed, met the compliance bar, and helped Datatrial move to the next stage of their trials with further funding. More than that, it took something people usually find a chore, giving feedback while unwell, and made it kinder.
Journeys, not averages
A discovery workshop and patient-journey mapping around seriously-ill personas set the priorities, so the app suited the people actually using it.
Feedback that helps
A gentler dot-based feedback system in place of negative-biased emotive scoring, plus peer reassurance ahead of sessions.
Built to compliance
A cross-platform React Native app with a Node.js/AWS backend, built to the clinical-compliance requirements sensitive trials demand.
A platform, over time
A later phase reworked it to serve multiple organisations from one platform.
The clever part here was not the technology, it was the empathy. Working out how to ask someone who is seriously ill how they feel, in a way that is quick, kind and still useful to the trial, is exactly the kind of problem we like getting right.
