The strategic value of journey mapping when developing medical devices
Published: January 2025
Grant Howarth, Interaction Design Consultant
It takes many specialists to get a medical device to market. Consider that a list of inventors, researchers, engineers, designers, medical domain experts, clinicians, and regulatory affairs, doesn’t even scratch the surface of the stakeholders involved in medical device development.
Each specialist brings their own unique views, insights and constraints from their areas of expertise. With so many different perspectives, it can be difficult to understand how each stakeholder impacts the user experience (UX) of the delivered device.
Strategic tools that promote holistic thinking and collaboration are therefore invaluable for developing a shared understanding of a project. In my experience as a UX Designer and Interaction Design Lead at Shore, journey mapping stands out for its sheer flexibility and utility.
What is journey mapping?
Typically, journey mapping visualises a user’s or stakeholder’s experiences with a product or service over time, highlighting touchpoints, pain points and opportunities.
Its techniques can also be used to map out almost any experience in the medical device development process that unfolds over time, such as:
- stages of a manufacturing line or entire product supply chain to identify opportunities for optimisation or potential risks.
- experiences of clinical trial participants and facilitators to support the development of study material and protocols.
- training programs for healthcare providers (HCPs) and end users to streamline the adoption of new medical devices.
Regardless of what it’s used for, when journey mapping is conducted with a diverse group of people, it helps project stakeholders develop a shared understanding of a problem domain and facilitates more effective planning and solutions.
In this article, I share the strategic benefits of journey mapping in medical device development and illustrate its application through a series of mini case studies of projects our team has worked on.
Journey mapping promotes holistic thinking
In the context of medical devices, journey mapping promotes holistic thinking by ensuring that every stage of the device’s lifecycle is considered, from design and development to clinical use and disposal, rather than isolated phases. This allows teams to visualise how the device fits within broader healthcare workflows or specific patient and user journeys.
For example, mapping the end-to-end experience of a wearable medical device would highlight not just the usability challenges during configuration and self-administration but also factors like data sharing from the patient to healthcare providers, or visualising events during long-term patient adherence.
This end-to-end perspective helps teams see the bigger picture, and how specific project elements interact over time. It highlights dependencies or potential bottlenecks that might be overlooked when a small phase of product use is examined in isolation.
Journey mapping’s simplicity facilitates collaboration
One of the most significant advantages of journey mapping that I find is its ability to bring together diverse threads from different stakeholders, from designers and engineers to clinical experts and even potential end users, through being able to visualise less tangible or time sensitive aspects of product development. This allows teams to better understand what each stakeholder needs from each phase of an experience.
In one project this temporal perspective was used to map a timeline of the audio and visual feedback from a device, such as beeps and LED pulses, over time. This helped the engineering and user interface (UI) team communicate the mechanical reality of the product to the wider team leading to a shared understanding.
In another project, we used journey mapping to streamline the development of Instructions for Use (IFU) for a wearable drug delivery device. In a collaborative session between designers, engineers, human factors, marketing and regulatory professionals – journey mapping helped capture the requirements of all project stakeholders and identify necessary project contributions to the IFU. Journey mapping helped us visualise the device’s sensory feedback, such as sound, visuals and haptics, helping the team to collaboratively identify what information would be critical to convey in instructions.
Identifying areas for further investigation
Because journey mapping helps to visualise and surface the combined knowledge of the team, it is also a powerful tool for identifying potential gaps in understanding and areas requiring further investigation. When mapping out each phase of a product experience step by step, you may even find an area or eventuality you hadn’t even considered. You can then plug these gaps with targeted research or cross team collaboration.
We recently used journey mapping to evaluate a product’s entire lifecycle from initial component manufacture to end use drug delivery. Doing so identified all potential risks during the journey and key points in the process where product testing should be conducted to surface further insights.
Journey mapping to contextualise user research and identify opportunities
While normally used to map out wider experiences, you can also narrow the focus and increase the granularity to investigate a specific phase of product use in detail. This can be helpful when mapping insights from usability studies or user research to the overall experience.
For example, in a project for a connected autoinjector, we helped our client map insights from usability studies to the potential sequences of physical and digital interactions when using the autoinjector – particularly focusing on how the device communicated important states using symbols and LED sequences. Through mapping users’ pain points against the actual steps, we were able to identify opportunities for improvement and make targeted recommendations.
Journey mapping as a design input
Journey mapping is also a powerful tool for informing design. Mapping out the granular details of a specific thread of the product or user experience means you can obtain a detailed representation of the potential flow of an experience allowing you to progress to design with confidence.
In a recent project we employed journey mapping to help develop the strategy for a training guide for a first-of-its-kind diabetes wearable device and its supporting app:
“Shore’s leadership in the journey mapping process helped us map each phase of the product experience, engaging key stakeholders to gather critical insights and craft a clear, actionable content strategy.
Our collaborative approach ensured the training materials were well-paced and easy to retain, breaking down complex information into manageable, memorable chunks.
The resulting guide became an essential tool during a validation study, effectively supporting HCPs, carers, and patients. Thanks to Shore’s guidance, we confidently progressed to a design that met the needs of all users”
Nicole Bernini, Head of Marketing, PharmaSens
These are just a few examples of how we have used journey mapping to help clients ranging from startups to global pharmaceutical companies. It’s a versatile and powerful strategic tool that promotes holistic thinking, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Visualising the entire journey of device development in this way means that projects can break down silos, integrate diverse perspectives, and achieve a unified understanding that drives better decision-making and outcomes.
Whether mapping the lifecycle of a device, developing user instructions, or planning supporting material for a validation study, journey mapping can help you visualise the path to great user experiences.
“When I first used journey mapping 15 years ago, I was amazed at its ability to consolidate research, identify problems, surface opportunities and demonstrate the impact of design improvements. Since then, it’s been a cornerstone of my toolkit for optimising user experiences”
Grant Howarth, Interaction Design Consultant, Shore
Do you have a complex project that would benefit from being mapped out? Contact our Business Development Manager, Holly Milston to arrange a discussion.
