Samsung HS30 Ultrasound Machine
My Role
I was on this project from Oct 2016 to May 2019. My primary role was Senior UX Designer. The roles I performed were visual design, user research, user interviews, clinical validation and QA for implementation from design perspective.
Background
The global healthcare imaging market is dominated by four companies: GE, Philips, Siemens and Canon.
Samsung purchased a South Korean healthcare company called Medison in 2012 to get a foothold in the medical imaging market.
Most ultrasound machines cater to the US, Canada, UK, Germany & Japanese markets. There is, however, a lot of potential in the emerging markets like Middle East, Asia Pacific i.e. India, Vietnam, Philippines, South America and Africa.
Typical Imaging products get split into three categories - High End, Mid Range and Entry Level.
High-end machines have most features but can get very expensive, even in the second market.
Problem
Samsung Medison catalogue had a mid segment product called HS40. They decided to remove the touch panel which brought down the cost to 1/3 HS40’s price.
Our task was to move all the features from HS40 touch screen to HS30 main screen without compromising the features.
This move impacted Interaction Design, Visual Design and Product Design.
Ergonomics of ultrasound machine
Typically, a radiologist/clinician would sit facing the patient. Their dominant hand would hold the probe to scan the area of the patient in diagnosis. The non-dominant hand would be on the control panel collecting the image, making annotations, measurements and so on.
HS40 touch panel was a huge benefit for technicians. The large button areas and simple workflows meant accessing features with non dominant hand was very easy.
Scan image
The most important part of an ultrasound screen is the scan image. Machines make it or break it in the market based on quality of the scan image. Everything else on the screen acts as support to the scan image. Primary goal of the design is to not detract from image contrast. Shown below is a typical scan image:
Scan Modes
There are three types of scan modes and 3 types of Doppler.
Challenges
Since the touch screen was removed, we had to move all the features to the main screen. A typical scan screen has limited real estate for buttons and features. Most of the space is taken up by the image area. The possible places we could move the features were left menu, right menu or knob menu area.
The other problem was ease of access and use. Since the user will use their non-dominant hand, they need to be able to toggle through multiple properties with ease while retaining the workflows from HS40.
Design decisions - User centric designs
We did multiple rounds of research in the beginning of the project. The research was conducted both in Seoul, South Korea and various hospitals across India. Based on our research, we found a few points that we had to keep in mind:
The scans in most places were done by a radiologist. The data was then sent to respective senior doctors for analysis
The typical large hospital performed 30-50 scans a day. The smaller ones performed lesser than that
Radiologist get very comfortable with a certain workflow and certain UI and do not like too much change to that
The speed of the radiologist determined how many patients went through the hospital. Faster and accurate radiologist meant more patients would be seen per day
Most of the scans were performed in very dark or dimly lit rooms. Our designs had to take into account the fatigue of radiologist eyes. More fatigue meant drop in accuracy and speed
In some hospitals, there were complaints of radiologist turnover. If our designs could help minimize training time or knowledge transfer time, then efficiency of ultrasound division of hospitals would increase
Design decisions - Interaction design
We did multiple sprints of design explorations. These designs went through early clinical validation with designers, doctors and ultrasound technicians. The conclusion from these validation session was to move the features of touch screen in HS40 to the bottom panel of main screen of HS30. We started calling this “Knob Menu”.
In HS40, the bottom panel was empty for the most part. We noticed the control panel had seven knobs: a central black knob and six white ones, three on each side of the black knob. We decided to break the bottom panel into seven sections and map each section to a knob on the control panel.
There was enough space to have 2 rows of features. Each knob would potentially control two properties. So we could bump up the total number of properties from 6 to 12. This key insight really helped us move a whole lot of features and properties from touch screen of HS40 to main screen of HS30.
The name of the feature would be on the left and magnitude would be on the right:
The centre was a big block to show the mode of the scan - 2D, Capture etc., The hierarchy of information is Scan mode > Scan properties. Since the central knob was black in colors, we kept the central block as black for visual symmetry.
The knobs had to levels of interaction: They could rotate and they could be pressed. We decided to assign toggle function for press and change of value for rotate.
When you rotate once, the current property would get highlighted or would be in hover state. The current active property menu is in blue. Then on pressing, the active knob menu moves down. The newly selected active state becomes blue with a blue outline to show hover state. On rotation, the values change for this particular menu. On pressing, it toggles again from the bottom menu to the top. Shown below is this process in action:
Product Design
The track ball is really cumbersome to use if we keep a number of toggle functions on the left hand panel. So we decided to incorporate a knob called ‘Menu Knob’. Rotating the knob would flip through all the buttons. Pressing the knob would select/deselect the button.
Visual Design
We had to look at the user psychology and the market to figure out what kind of interfaces we had to design.
The users of Ultrasound fall in the laggards part of the tech curve. We had to keep this in mind when designing the visuals
The GUI in the market leaders in 2017 is shown below. First is Siemens Acuson1000
Next is GE Logiq
The visual for Canon Aplio i900
And Philips EPIQ 7
Design decisions - Color
The color choices were based on three basic considerations:
Samsung-Medison brand color was Blue
Ultrasound scan images are viewed in a dark room and the central image is dark. Therefore value range of colors has to be in the lower greys and contrast has to be medium to small
From our research, we knew the constrast has to be low so there is no fatigue for radiologist. I had to use the blue sparingly.
Based on these points, I picked the color palette above and built the rest of the application.
Design decisions - Typeface
Samsung is a global brand. HS30’s primary market was the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). It would also be sold in other countries. We went with NotoSans as a way to support multiple languages reliably. NotoSans is especially brilliant for non western scripts like CJK and Devanagri. It is also a very pretty typeface. As a designer, its fun to use a good, well designed typeface to create interfaces :)
Clinical validations
We did multiple rounds of research and verifications through the entire duration of the project.
Research
We participated in Ultrasound clinical training conducted by Clinicians (South Korea). While in Korea, we also conducted legacy product workflow analysis.
We also had the opportunity to work on multiple ultrasound machines of competitors. This gave us great insight into what’s available in the market and where we can add value.
Design Verification
At various phases of the design project, we would do design verification and validation (South Korea, multiple locations in India). Once the final designs were implemented, we conducted a final verification.
Final design
The video shows the workflow of one of the features called Ez Assist. The feature helps the clinician align the probe on the patient. Its a good way to see the various aspects of the final design - colors, buttons, icons, knob menu, icons amongst others.
Here is a detailed video explaining the complete use of the HS30 machine from Peru, one of our markets
This is a review from the Bogota, Colombia, another of our target markets:
Key takeaways
We worked on this project from inception to shipping for nearly three years. A good team is essential for success of the project. Constant verification with SMEs and designing from user’s perspective is vital to building a great product.
This is product page link: shorturl.at/pAGX0
This project is very special to me and it feels great to see it in the market across the world. Very proud of my team