Why is a GUI important in medicine?

Whether in the operating room or at home, medical device GUIs are on the front lines of delivering effective care to patients. Medical GUIs are the key interface between humans and computers, using visual, audible, and tactile elements to enable safe and easy interactions. Modern medical GUIs are evolving to provide not only more complex features, they must also offer a rich, smartphone-like experience to win over the hearts and minds of medical practitioners.

What to consider when creating a medical GUI?

To create an effective user experience with medical GUIs, manufacturers must incorporate strong human factors expertise, adopt processes that support UX designers and software developers working together, and use application architectures that separate the GUI code from the hardware. By aligning UX design closely with development, and allowing both to work in parallel on a GUI application that is decoupled from the platform, manufacturers are better able to prototype, build, and validate UX in faster timeframes.

What are the top market drivers for medical GUIs?

There are three drivers for building effective GUI user experiences (UX) for medical devices: Competition, complexity, and attractiveness. The strong competition among medical device OEMs causes enormous pressure to deliver products and updates faster than everyone else. Increasing complexity in user needs and in integrating more technologies onto one device causes friction between development effort and shorter timelines. Perhaps the biggest pressure in creating medical GUIs is delivering the vivid graphics and interactivity that users have come to expect from their smartphones. Clients often tell us that even though a device’s functional and safety requirements may have been met, sales to a health care network can be won or lost based on the product’s look and feel.

How do you avoid bad medical GUI design?

With the number of medical device recalls growing — many caused by poor user interface design — there are three factors to consider for improving UX. First, real-world usability and UX testing is essential for gathering independent feedback that helps mitigate the future cost of user-related defects. Second, GUI designers and developers must work in parallel to leverage the unique skill sets of both and make decisions together without sacrificing good UX, good software design, and safety compliance. Third, rapid iterations and testing should be built into the development process, allowing designers to quickly update UX based on feedback without disrupting the backend work of software developers.

Medical User Interface Design | Medical Device UX

Industry Leaders Trust Us.

Rapidly create your best medical user interface

To keep pace with rapid innovations in patient diagnostics, collaborative care, and connected systems, medical device manufacturers recognize the need to deliver user experiences that streamline complex operations into clear and safe procedures.

Whether it's a portable monitor, infusion pump, or robotic surgery system, our Storyboard embedded GUI development framework is a proven solution for medical GUIs that require high-reliability and ease-of-use for practitioners. Storyboard connects UX designers and developers in a productive, parallel workflow that accelerates medical user interface design, development, and validation on low-power, low-cost platforms.

Healthcare worker using a Ventec VOSCN critical care ventilator

Ventec updates GUI for COVID-19

Ventec needed to produce a medical equipment interface to serve the needs of healthcare professionals on the frontlines of COVID-19 and offer a smartphone-like experience.
See how fast they did it ▸

Storyboard medical user interface design on Microchip

Featured at Microchip MASTERS, this short video showcases a medical UX demo of a patient vitals monitor embedded on the SAMA5D2, created in collaboration with Microchip.

When reliability and intuitiveness are critical

Storyboard separates the developer and designer environments for ease of adoption, and enables a parallel workflow so that design and validation can always move forward. With WYSIWYG editing, medical device GUI teams get a visual of the product on the target device, where behavior can be optimized in real-time, resulting in reliable performance without having to compromise between sophisticated UX design and platform resources.

Faster cycles, faster time-to-market

When UX designers and embedded developers use Storyboard’s Rapid Design Import and Iteration Technology, teams are able to create and validate products at a far superior pace.

Save money

Reduce your BOM by minimizing your software's footprint, as well as memory and power draw without sacrificing performance!

Scale up or down

Create applications for anything from the highest performance devices down to the lowest MCUs.

Why is a GUI important in medicine?

Whether in the operating room or at home, medical device GUIs are on the front lines of delivering effective care to patients. Medical GUIs are the key interface between humans and computers, using visual, audible, and tactile elements to enable safe and easy interactions. Modern medical GUIs are evolving to provide not only more complex features, they must also offer a rich, smartphone-like experience to win over the hearts and minds of medical practitioners.
What are the top market drivers for medical GUIs?

There are three drivers for building effective GUI user experiences (UX) for medical devices: Competition, complexity, and attractiveness. The strong competition among medical device OEMs causes enormous pressure to deliver products and updates faster than everyone else. Increasing complexity in user needs and in integrating more technologies onto one device causes friction between development effort and shorter timelines. Perhaps the biggest pressure in creating medical GUIs is delivering the vivid graphics and interactivity that users have come to expect from their smartphones. Clients otten tell us that even though a device’s functional and safety requirements may have been met, sales to a health care network can be won or lost based on the product’s look and feel.

What to consider when creating a medical GUI?

To create an effective user experience with medical GUIs, manufacturers must incorporate strong human factors expertise, adopt processes that support UX designers and software developers working together, and use application architectures that separate the GUI code from the hardware. By aligning UX design closely with development, and allowing both to work in parallel on a GUI application that is decoupled from the platform, manufacturers are better able to prototype, build, and validate UX in faster timeframes.
How do you avoid bad medical GUI design?

With the number of medical device recalls growing — many caused by poor user interface design — there are three factors to consider for improving UX. First, real-world usability and UX testing is essential for gathering independent feedback that helps mitigate the future cost of user-related defects. Second, GUI designers and developers must work in parallel to leverage the unique skill sets of both and make decisions together without sacrificing good UX, good software design, and safety compliance. Third, rapid iterations and testing should be built into the development process, allowing designers to quickly update UX based on feedback without disrupting the backend work of software developers.

Embedded medical user interface design in an operating room

Fortune 500 medtech manufacturer saves over $80K

Our client saved over $80K+ in development costs and took roughly 1/10 of the time to build a Storyboard GUI, then it would have taken using their existing tools.

See how we helped ▸

We’re constantly innovating, and Storyboard lets us tweak the graphics and optimize the animations with great ease, with minimal impact on our product development cycles. In fact, our users often comment on how much they like the touch screen interface and how quick and easy it is to set up.

Michael Holmes

Senior Software Engineer, Ventec Life Systems

Crank's graphics software package demonstrated a great touch screen experience for our users, and showcased our demo’s ability to integrate multiple medical device data streams into a single cohesive design.

Marten L. Smith

Medical Products Group, Microchip Technology

Bringing medical user interface designs to life

From portable ventilators to wearable health tech, our Storyboard embedded GUI development framework helps you create sophisticated medical UX

Industry Leaders Trust Us.