Designing with Empathy, Transforming Digital Experiences

Rooted in research. Driven by design.

Our 8th Light team conducted more than three months of research with caregivers — parents of children with rare disorders — that helped guide the iterative software design and development prototyping process. We explored and tested a variety of different experiences along the caregiver journey, intentionally designing moments to guide and support them, whether that be delivering information that might answer their questions or simply indicating the current status of their pending test results and helping them anticipate what comes next.

Gaining actionable insights.

The caregiver journey is emotionally and logistically fluid — fraught with anxiety and continually seeking informational and social resources in search of answers. Therefore, it is crucial to create experiences that are flexible and can adapt to their needs, while also providing much needed structure and stability. We developed numerous design insights from our research to inspire and guide our solutions for the critical steps along the journey. Each insight attempts to convey a tension the caregiver is having to manage and serves as inspiration for opportunities for design. For example:

Waiting For Results
When anxiously awaiting genetic test results, caregivers are already overwhelmed before the inevitable influx of information. Caregivers want to be able to focus on actions to care for their child that are within their control.

Receiving Results
Caregivers clearly want to see results right away that best prepare themselves to help their child as quickly as possible, but even if they receive those results quickly, the results may not ease their anxiety.

Collecting & Sharing
Caregivers want to track and maintain their information in one place, but the variety of formats, lack of understanding when certain docs are required, and skepticism to share information within digital solutions can be overwhelming and obscure the benefits of doing so.

Digital transformation for the human journey.

Beyond the knowledge that our efforts might help people better understand and navigate one of the most difficult journeys anyone can face, we’re honored to have helped GeneDX evolve the way it thinks about and creates software, while enabling its transformation from a pure diagnostics laboratory into a compassionate and trusted direct-contact genomic information resource. We did this by:

• Demonstrating the benefits of empowering designers and developers with autonomy. By having a shared understanding of caregiver needs and aligned objectives, we were able to drive product development using intuition of the entire team.

• Through careful consideration and organization of essential design components, we managed to separate out our library to enable code to be leveraged across other GeneDx products, saving months of work for those development teams.

• Our cross-functional integrated team including GeneDx technology team members and genetic counselors across national and international time zones ensured our solutions fit within strict design and performance criteria, and be fully owned and maintained by their teams.