Intuitive
Improving the Robotic Surgery Experience
Timeline
May 2021 - Aug 2021
Role
Interaction Design Intern
Team
Interaction Design @Intuitive
Tools & Skills
Interaction Design, Live Prototyping, Product Design, Usability, Figma
Overview
This summer I worked at Intuitive to lead the first design cycle of an immersive, multi-modal 3D surgical feature for the head-in console of the next generation Da Vinci Robotic system
To comply with the NDA, I will not be sharing any pictures or ideas specifically tied to this project. If you want to learn more, please email me at neelsaswade@gmail.com.
This page will focus more on the unique experience of designing interactions for surgical robots and how this internship shaped me as a designer.
Intuitive’s Flagship Robot
“The da Vinci surgical system was one of the first robotic-assisted, minimally invasive surgical systems cleared by the FDA. To date, the family of da Vinci technologies has been used by surgeons in all 50 U.S. states and 67 countries around the world to perform more than 8.5 million procedures” - Intuitive
The components of a Da Vinci System
Patient Cart
Head-In Console
Vision Cart
What’s designing for medical like?
With human lives at hand, medical machinery comes with a vast list of regulations and guidelines to follow. Ensuring everything we design follows these protocols lengthens the design process, specifically by increasing the testing phase of a new feature.
Seeing your work become a reality can take years, as opposed to months at typical web-based companies. However, with this time, every feature pushed to the live robot has been deeply analyzed to serve a pivotal purpose in the surgical workflow and designed to feel, as the company name, intuitive
Interaction Design
“The goal of interaction design is to create products that enable the user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible.
If this definition sounds broad, that’s because the field is rather broad: the interaction between a user and product often involves elements like aesthetics, motion, sound, space, and many more” - Teo Yu Siang (interaction-design.org)
The interaction design team @Intuitive follows the Double Diamond Approach when designing features for the robot. This framework is divided into 4 phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.
Although similar, compared to the Human-Centered Design Process, the Double Diamond Approach places more emphasis on repeated evaluations of the deliverables.
Understanding Robotic Surgery
Surgeons are busy people. You can’t always book them for a user interview the same way you would book interviewees for a regular design project. To bridge the gap, Intuitive has Clinical Development Engineers, or CDEs for short. CDEs are clinically trained engineers, who also went to medical school. They are a rough representation of the surgeons that use Intuitive’s products. I booked a lot of meetings with my CDE to learn more about robotic surgery.
Below is a snapshot of a zoom call of my CDE guiding me through a recorded robot assisted inguinal hernia repair.
In addition to working with CDEs, I gathered data from Interaction Designers who have worked on similar projects and pages of documentation on Confluence.
Being accustomed to gathering my own user data, usually from conducting interviews, it felt weird to me to get my information from my colleagues. I found myself having to meta-analyze information from various sources to gather personas, use cases, and pain points. The Discover phase taught me how to rely on various resources for information when you cannot always conduct interviews with your target user group.
Designing a workflow
One of the most fun parts of this internship was brainstorming how my given feature would work with my team. Being an intern, I had a much shorter time with the robot than my team consisting of designers, human factors engineers, CDEs, and developers. For this reason, I decided to rely on my colleague’s years worth of experience in generating ideas. Prior to the brainstorm, I prepared various “How Might We” questions to guide the brainstorm. These questions led a productive brainstorm session where we generated innovative, practical, even funny ideas. The lighthearted environment made this a really fun activity.
Ideas from the brainstorm were affinity mapped and analyzed by frequency, feasibility, and effectiveness. Selected ideas were conceptualized into a workflow in Figma. These workflows demonstrated how the given feature would function.
Working with Engineering
Since engineering teams work through defined project cycles, I learned you have to communicate your designs extremeley efficiently in order for them to make their deadlines. My engineering background came in handy as I would switch perspectives when working on my workflows and ask myself, “would these designs be specific enough for me to go and build it myself?” I also brought engineers along in the brainstorm and design process. By doing so, they were already familiar with the designs and had their own investment in them.
Bringing the design to life
It was no short of magical when I saw the designs live on the robot as a demo. The engineering team had done a stellar job of recreating Figma mockups into reality. Certain designs that were not feasible for the live robot were recreated on virtual reality. This way, we could adequately assess all the interactions planned for this design cycle
While the engineering team was bringing the feature to life, I worked with Human Factors Engineers to design an evaluation for the demo. I learned a lot about risk analysis and maximizing time to test the most important interactions in the current design cycle.
Various employees from Intuitive visited the demo and it was really satisfying to see them interact with the proposed feature. I felt blessed to be able to see this feature in a live demo on a $2 million dollar robot, as an intern.
Reflecting on this internship
This internship helped me build a sense of intuition as a designer. Prior to this experience, I was accustomed to relying on the human-centered design process to provide me with enough information to make proper design decisions. However, situations in the industry may not let you follow all these steps. For example, I had to rely on my team more than surgeons for user interview data. By finding myself in these situations, I found myself developing a feeling for when I’m ready to move on to the next stage of the design process. I immediately felt this sense of intuition bleed into my more recent design projects.
I also gained a lot of experience communicating with cross-functional stakeholders. I learned how to rely on my team by leveraging the roles of Human Factors Engineers, Clinical Development Engineers, Interaction Designers, and Software Engineers in the design process.