Case study · IQVIA Trial Designer
Consolidating 15 clinical‑trial workflows into one modeling platform.
Clinical‑trial planners were making complex, interconnected decisions across fragmented workflows. I helped define a unified platform that made those decisions easier to enter, review, and compare.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Domain
- Clinical‑trial planning
- Scope
- Product strategy, workflow architecture, interaction design
- Scale
- 15 workflows consolidated
Outcomes
15
Workflows consolidated
Related planning activities were brought into one shared platform structure.
50%
Faster completion
Internal pilots reduced time to complete core modeling work by approximately half.
$300M
Projected opportunity
The platform supported a significant projected business opportunity for IQVIA.
Thesis
The complexity wasn’t the problem. The lack of structure around it was.
The context
Planning a trial required moving between disconnected workflows.
Trial Designer was a new platform for modeling clinical trials, including complex oncology and vaccine studies. The existing process distributed related decisions across 15 separate workflows.
That fragmentation made it difficult to understand how one choice affected another. Review also moved outside the product, with teams comparing model outputs through email and other disconnected tools.
Findings
What I found
- Fragmented decisions
- Choices that belonged to one trial model were spread across separate workflows and screens.
- Repeated interaction problems
- Similar data-entry tasks behaved differently depending on where planners encountered them.
- Review outside the product
- Teams relied on email and disconnected files to compare models and discuss tradeoffs.
The decision
Organize the complexity. Don’t hide it.
Clinical‑trial planning could not be reduced to a lightweight sequence of simple questions. The design needed to preserve the depth experts required while making relationships, dependencies, and comparisons easier to follow.
Design responses
The platform needed to do three things well.
A single modeling system
We consolidated 15 related workflows into a shared product structure. Planners could move through the model without losing sight of the larger study or repeatedly reestablishing context.
Reusable patterns for complex data entry
The interface used consistent structures for repeated tasks, including grouped inputs, progressive disclosure, validation, and contextual guidance. The goal was not to make the work appear simple, but to make complex entry predictable.
Side-by-side model comparison
A data-dense comparison view allowed teams to evaluate model outputs together rather than exporting information and discussing differences through email.
What changed
From scattered workflows to a coherent modeling system.
The proposed platform connected data entry, model logic, and review within one experience. Instead of treating each workflow as a separate task, the design framed them as parts of a shared trial model.
That structure made the product easier to navigate without flattening the underlying clinical complexity.
Reflection
What I’d carry forward.
Data-dense products do not become usable simply by removing information. Expert users often need the complexity; the design challenge is helping them understand its structure and consequences.
This project reinforced the value of treating workflow architecture, interaction consistency, and comparison as parts of the same system rather than separate interface problems.