Karius Internal Tools

Lead Product Designer

Redesigned the internal software tools that enable our teams to receive patient samples, process orders, and deliver critical patient results to physicians

The need for the Karius Test

In 2021 around 2.8 million hospital admissions in the U.S. were due to infections in immunocompromised patients. The standard of care includes invasive, diagnostic tests that can cause complications for the patient, take too long to produce a result, or can sometimes fail to identify the causative pathogen.

As an alternative, The Karius Test is a liquid biopsy for infectious diseases that can rapidly and non-invasively detect over 1,000 pathogens in a small sample of blood.

How does it work?

When a physician suspects an infection in their patient, they will order a Karius Test by sending a sample of the patient's blood, and once Karius' lab has processed the sample, they will receive a report with a result about 24 hours later.

The problem

In order to complete the process above, Karius' internal Lab Operations (LapOps) and Customer Success (CS) teams were previously relying on a legacy lab information system (LIS) that had barely been updated since it launched in 2015. The old LIS system was built when Karius was receiving <100 orders a month - as of Jan 2024, we now receive ~1,600 samples per month. As Karius continues to scale, it is critical for our internal operations teams to be able to keep pace with the increasing sample demand to maintain the value of Karius's rapid turnaround time.

At the same time the tech stack of the old LIS system was becoming very difficult to maintain and update. This presented us with the opportunity to rebuild the system from scratch with a focus on usability and scalability.

Design goals

My role as a Product Designer in this project was to hit two main objectives:

  • 🚀 Create new internal operations tools to empower our Lab Operations and Customer Success teams to efficiently and accurately process all orders

  • 🛠 Design for consistency and scale by using reusable components to simplify changes, reducing design and technical debt
Discovery

I started this project shortly after joining Karius, which meant I had to rapidly familiarize myself with the LabOps and CS teams' current workflows and processes. I knew that by developing a deep understanding of how these teams worked both independently and collaboratively was an essential first step in identifying opportunities for improvement.

I partnered with our UX research intern to shadow and contextually interview members of the LabOps and CS teams while they completed their daily tasks. Through this process I was able to create workflow diagrams to better under their current paint points and process gaps.

Discovery takeaways

After many hours observing and interviewing these teams, we identified the following key areas as opportunities for improvement:

  • Although both teams were using a single LIS system, their usage of this monolithic app was actually quite segmented. There was therefore an opportunity to reduce each team's cognitive load by breaking apart this one system into task-focused apps.

  • There were multiple points in LabOps and CS' itersecting workflows that required one team to manually notify the other of an issue or action item. Each of these manual notifications were costing teams time and introducing the risk of human error. We knew it would be important to automate these notifications when possible.

  • During contextual inquiries, I observed redundant steps in users' workflows simply due to layouts and realized some page hierarchy optimization would be an easy way to improve task effeciency.
User stories and new workflows

I then spent time with my Product Manager mapping out a hierarchy of user stories based on what we had learned about users needs. I used these stories to map out improved workflows and the object model needed to support these tasks. I like to do task object modeling before sketching out any screens to better understand the the relationships that will need to be reflected in an app's information architecture.

Early concepts and validation

I then went through cyles of wireframing rough concepts and meeting with members of the LabOps and Customer Success teams to validate my design proposals.

Establishing a design system

When I joined Karius, there was a premilimary style guide with brand colors and font styles. I knew it would be much easier to maintain visual consistency and hand off designs seamlessly if we had a formal design system in place. While I was iterating on design concepts, I also built out a design system library in Figma of tokens and components to be used across Karius' internal and external applications. I worked with a developer on my team to translate these components into a Storybook library to be easily referenced by all of our engineering team.

Atomic tokens

At the atomic level of our design system, I defined color, spacing, and typography tokens with a focus on accessibility and readability.

Component library

Using the tokens I built out a library of nested and reusable components. These components are based on Material Design and MUI, but have been customized with Karius' brand colors and fonts.

🚀 Improving efficiency by design

Design goal #1: Create new internal operations tools to empower our Lab Operations and Customer Success teams to efficiently and accurately process all orders

Order management dashboard

Depending on where an order is in the overall fulfillment pipeline, the LabOps and CS teams will have specific tasks to complete for that order.
I designed this landing page - which buckets orders by phases and flags - so that both teams have visibility of all orders in the pipeline and quick access to those that most urgently need their attention.

Navigating between orders

The LabOps and CS teams need to locate certain orders to complete specific tasks. I designed a left navigation bar, filtering, and column visibility controls to help users more easily locate the specific orders they're looking for.

Centralized order information

In the previous LIS system, specific fields of information for an order were scattered and therefore difficult to find. I designed a new overview for each order where all of the related fields are grouped together for easier look up.

Verifying order information

One of the core tasks of the CS team is to verify that our digital record of the order information matches what is on the paper form that was mailed in with the patient sample. This verification step is how we ensure that only accurate information gets printed on the result report that is sent to physicians. While shadowing the CS team, I realized that the page layout in the old LIS system didn't allow for side-by-side viewing of the digital and paper forms. I redesigned and optimized this page layout for quicker and easier TRF verification.

Conclusion & next steps

Since the March 2023 launch, LabOps and CS have successfully been using the redesigned tools to process and fulfill all commercial orders. The overall response to both teams has been very positive:

  • "Definitely easier to do reporting and less clicks" -LabOps member
  • "Accessioning flow is more streamlined; easier to see everything and very logical/fast to use." -LabOps member
  • "All of CS says it saves them time having the photos and TRF info together in one field. No need to open multiple windows to do the verification. It's also easier to search for patients than the previous system. Saves time when you're on the phone with a provider." -CS member

Moving forward we will explore updates as our order intake continues to grow and how our internal teams' workflows and tools may need to change to support multiple order types for new Karius products.