YPrime

Designing for Everyone — Foundational Design Principles for a Clinical Research Tool. A deep dive into the emotionally neutral, accessible UX behind ECOA yPrime — a platform built to serve participants across age, ability, and geography in high-stakes clinical trials. Clinical trials depend on digital tools to collect data from participants across the world — across languages, abilities, and devices. ECOA yPrime is one such tool: a mobile and tablet-based platform built to gather real-world clinical data with precision, trust, and care. Designing for this space comes with uncommon constraints — ethical, regulatory, and technical. Every design choice has implications for medical integrity, patient safety, and research validity.

Research-Driven Design

Clinical research exists within a uniquely controlled, often opaque environment. Standard usability patterns don’t always apply — and insight from competitors is limited or non-existent. From the outset, simplicity alone wasn’t enough. We needed to redefine what usability means in a space where lives and outcomes depend on precision.

The greatest challenge was inclusion. We engaged participants and clinical professionals from diverse regions, age groups, and abilities, designing for conditions rarely considered in consumer UX — low-connectivity environments, legacy Android devices, screen readers, and cognitive or visual accessibility needs.

To meet these demands, we anchored the design in three principles:

• Clarity – so no action or state ever feels ambiguous.

• Accessibility – ensuring usability across ability, language, and device.

• Trust – creating emotional neutrality that fosters confidence and compliance.

Every screen, message, and interaction was shaped by these principles — ensuring that ECOA yPrime didn’t just work technically, but felt safe, transparent, and human. Every detail — from layout to motion — was informed by evidence. We conducted qualitative interviews, usability sessions, surveys, and exploratory studies across demographics and abilities. We validated assumptions and uncovered biases we couldn’t see. Our participants ranged from tech-hesitant seniors to digitally fluent teens, across continents and languages. Personas guided our hypotheses, but real users revealed the truth. In a domain where even small friction can lead to lost data or mistrust, research isn’t just validation — it’s protection.

Designing for Modularity, Not Personalization

Each ECOA yPrime user is unique — by age, language, country, and device — but so is every clinical study. The challenge was to build a system flexible enough for research variation while remaining emotionally consistent for participants. Unlike consumer products, personalization wasn’t the goal. Personalization risks biasing data, changing perception of questions, or introducing variability into results. In clinical UX, neutrality protects integrity. Instead, we designed for modularity — for researchers, not participants.

Study teams needed control over structure, logic, and formatting to meet regulatory, institutional, and cultural standards.

• Some studies required visible copyright notices on every screen.

• Others dictated text alignment or progress bar behavior based on established protocols.

• Every interaction type — branching logic, question order, input method — could vary and often required third-party certification.

Our framework allowed this flexibility without fragmenting the participant experience. The result: one consistent UX language adaptable to thousands of unique study configurations.

Scalability

Scalability was our earliest challenge — not just technically, but culturally. The app needed to perform flawlessly across screen sizes, system settings, and languages — more than 250+ of them.

Every component was designed to flex and respond to its environment:

• No fixed widths. No hardcoded text.

• Layouts adapt to long labels, right-to-left reading, and regional interface conventions.

• Typography supports complex scripts and extended character sets.

Internationalization wasn’t treated as an afterthought — it was built into the foundation. The design system respects linguistic and cultural nuance, ensuring the experience feels natural whether you’re in Seoul, São Paulo, or Stockholm. The result is a product that doesn’t just translate — it transforms gracefully, honoring both global scale and local context.

Shape & Colour

Colour and text are powerful, but both can fail. Colour blindness, dyslexia, glare, or assistive technology can strip them of meaning. So we made shape and structure the foundation of our interface language.

Every core action — sending, confirming, navigating — is defined by predictable placement, distinct geometry, and clear affordance. Buttons are never decorative; they’re designed to be understood even if unseen or unread. We applied redundant design throughout: meaning is never carried by a single sensory cue. If you blur the text, the interface still communicates purpose and flow. This approach particularly benefits elderly participants or those under cognitive load — people for whom routine and predictability aren’t conveniences, but lifelines. Clinical trials depend on routine. Clarity and consistency accelerate familiarity, build trust, and reduce dropout.

We chose a calm, mid-spectrum purple as our primary CTA colour — emotionally neutral, universally legible, and deliberately unbranded. Colour in ECOA yPrime performs structural work: every cue is paired with an icon or label, all colours meet WCAG contrast standards, subtle gradients and soft transitions create calm motion without overstimulation.

It sits far from medical clichés like hospital blue or alarm red, evoking nothing in particular — and that’s exactly the goal. Neutrality prevents emotional influence and fosters balance. Colour is never the sole indicator of meaning. Instead, it supports a layered system of icons, shapes, and text proximity to ensure comprehension across all perceptual contexts. The outcome is a visual environment that feels steady and humane — not sterile, not decorative — just quietly supportive.

Interaction

Interaction needed to feel grounded and predictable — a calm rhythm, not a performance. We avoided flashy animations or sudden transitions that could confuse or fatigue users. Instead, motion follows real-world metaphors:

Every modal does one thing only — inform or request, never both. Complex interactions are sequenced to reduce cognitive load. Even these micro-moments were rigorously tested for emotional safety across cultures and demographics. We didn’t design to motivate people; we designed to respect them.

• Moving forward slides left, like passing a sheet of paper.

• Opening a survey drops it down — an interaction that feels handed to you.

• Completing a task lifts it away.

• Each transition reinforces spatial logic.

• System-triggered modals slide down (delivered to you).

• User-triggered modals slide up (originating from you).

At the heart of the home screen sits the calendar — a bold, heavy anchor that tells users only one thing: what day it is. Below it are today’s tasks. When they’re complete, they stay visible until the next day begins. If tomorrow has no tasks, the space remains empty — intentionally. That emptiness is design. It signals closure and respect: you’re done, you can rest. In an age of attention extraction, this silence is radical. Every alert in ECOA yPrime must earn its presence — timely, actionable, meaningful. If it doesn’t serve purpose, it doesn’t exist.

The Engagement Playbook (and Why We Set It Aside)

In most digital products, engagement is everything. In clinical research, engagement must not distort behavior.

We tested common engagement techniques — progress rings, streaks, compliance scores — and rejected them all. They introduced emotional pressure, reward-seeking, or bias that could compromise data integrity. Instead, we practiced invisible encouragement. After completing a task or training, users receive a small, passive badge — no sound, no distracting animation, no complex interaction. Just a quiet signal of closure: thank you, you’re done!

A Quick Note on eConsent

Alongside ECOA yPrime, we designed eConsent — a complementary product that allows participants to review, annotate, and sign study documents digitally.

Built as a deep extension of the ECOA ecosystem, it supports:

• Section-by-section comprehension

• Highlighting and notes

• Reconsent and multi-party signatures (e.g., for children)

• Consultation workflows with clinical staff

Each interaction was designed to ensure true understanding before consent — not just a digital signature. While still early, eConsent sets a new standard for ethical, transparent participation and deserves its own dedicated case study.

Future features like AI-assisted survey guidance or adaptive logic can evolve on top — but only within the boundaries of neutrality, predictability, and safety. Because in this field, UX isn’t just design — it’s scientific instrumentation.

Outcome & Impact

ECOA yPrime was designed for endurance, not trend. Clinical research evolves slowly — every change must undergo validation, impact assessment, and regulatory approval. Even a microcopy update can affect data comparability. So we built a system that’s stable at its core yet flexible at its edges. ECOA yPrime isn’t the flashiest app in the world. But it might be one of the most human.

• User insight driven UX from initial sketch through to full launch — introducing both ECOA yPrime and the new eConsent product.

• Cross-platform design system supporting 250+ languages and stringent accessibility standards.

• Embedded regulatory requirements seamlessly into every interaction without compromising usability, aligned with global regulations (FDA, EMA, GDPR, HIPAA).

• Modular survey component library and resilient UX framework that adapts to every study’s protocol and geography.

• A foundation engineered for five to ten years of adaptability.