Overview
As the founding Design Director at CareFusion, I established the strategic benefits of a standardized look-and-feel with senior management. I was provided special funding, and executed a Design System project in partnership with Ziba Design California.
I drove tight integration of hardware and software experience, including a highly contextual and architect-friendly CMF palette. We established a laddered-approach of core-values, positioning, principles, and signature elements. I later expanded the guidelines into software platforms through an online Design-Pattern repository.
Our Aria Design System covers the branded look-and-feel of industry leading brands including Alaris Infusion Systems, Pyxis Dispensing Technologies, and Viasys Respiratory and Neurocare.
Opportunity
CareFusion designs and manufactures a wide-range of critical-care medical devices. Prior to my establishment of a centralized User Experience Design group, each product was developed by different vendors eager to apply their own unique personality and set of behaviors.
With each new development project, the lack of guidelines meant starting from scratch, creating more development effort, and ultimately confusing our customers and destroying brand equity. Worse, because each product behaved differently, clinical users had more to learn, creating opportunity for use-error.
Style Study Kit
Co-creation collage kit
Co-creation collage
Personality matching
Style Preference
Topic deep-dive
We began by developing and implementing a Style-Study. We built a unique co-creation toolkit that we sent to a representative sample of our clinical users nationwide. The toolkit allowed clinicians to express their style as it applied to their personal and professional life with exercises that included collage and forced-associations. I simultaneously implemented an audit of our competitors, and performed internal stakeholder interviews.
Armed with this data, I directed an 11-week collaboration with Ziba Design California. Our goal was to formalize design strategy, ideate, and document a catalog of signature-elements as they apply to a single reference product. At it’s peak, this effort involved over ten designers and review with dozens of Marketers and Engineers.
Aria provided a set of signature elements like the Peak, Utility, Lamina and Soft-Touch details shown here. The guidelines provided examples of use and construction. A complementary UI system was also created to ensure a seamless product experience.
Results
The program provided a strategic path for CareFusion's future product portfolio, including Pyxis medication dispensing, Alaris infusion, Viasys respiratory and more. CareFusion has since been acquired by BD, which has continued to grow the UX department I founded.
