Little Journey

The Challenge

Managing participants across international drug trials is a complex, high-stakes task, and the tools available to research staff were not making it any easier. Clinicians needed a back-end system capable of handling large volumes of participants without adding administrative burden, while the front-end experience for children and families needed to be engaging enough to keep them adherent to the trial and reduce drop-off. Both products had to work within the demanding constraints of a clinical setting.

Our Approach

A phased process ran across both products simultaneously, grounding every decision in research with the people who would actually use them: clinical trial staff for the administration portal, and children and parents for the medication tracker.

Research & Discovery

Full immersion in the world of clinical trials shaped the foundation of this project. Research was conducted with users across the end-to-end clinical journey, covering a thorough review and synthesis of existing data on admin systems in clinical settings, more than 20 hours of user interviews to discover needs, behaviours and pain points, and as-is user journey mapping for a typical clinical trial.

This built a grounded understanding of the environment, the pressures research staff work under, and where the current tools were creating friction.

UX Design

The service experience for internal clinical trial users was redesigned from the ground up, informed directly by the research findings. New ideal user journeys were created around the actual experiences of healthcare workers, service blueprints were drafted mapping the relationships between online systems used in hospital settings, and the key tasks performed by trial workers were identified and prioritised.

Those tasks were then grouped into independent modules to allow for phased design and delivery, giving the team the flexibility to build and test one area at a time without disrupting the broader system.

Prototyping & Testing

A structured programme of usability testing validated the UX designs. For each module, wireframes were created covering all key tasks, fully interactive desktop prototypes were developed, and remote facilitated user testing sessions validated the design approach with real clinical trial staff.

Testing ran iteratively, with findings feeding back into the next round of design refinement. By the time the project moved into high-fidelity UI design, every core journey had been tested and validated.

UI Design

A series of rapid design sprints produced high-fidelity UI designs for each module, building on the tested and validated wireframes and incorporating the feedback gathered during testing.

Close collaboration with Little Journey’s development partners and key stakeholders throughout this phase ensured outputs were clearly communicated and could be actioned effectively, maintaining continuity between design intent and the final built product.

Medication Tracker

Alongside the administration portal, the brief also included a user-facing paediatric medication tracker module for the public-facing app, designed to encourage children’s adherence to the trial and reduce drop-off rates.

Research with both parents and children uncovered the key behaviours around taking medicines. Gamification techniques were then incorporated to make regular adherence feel rewarding rather than routine, with themed, age-specific content and real-life challenges sitting at the heart of an engaging, age-appropriate mobile UI.

The Results

The two products gave Little Journey a robust, well-designed platform for managing clinical trial participants at scale, while giving the children and families involved an experience designed around their needs rather than the clinical process.