enFocus & Mimik Studio
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Innovation Intern
May 2024 - August 2024
Timeline: 12 weeks
Role: UX Designer & Product Manager
Tools: Figma & Jira
Methods: High-Fidelity Prototyping, System Usability Scales (SUS), Literature Review
Disclaimer: Some details about this project may be limited due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement
Problem: Speech-Language Pathologists spend significant time manually transcribing speech into the International Phonetic Alphabet, leading to fatigue, errors, and reduced focus on client treatment. Mimik aims to automate this workflow, but needed clear, validated user flows to move toward development and clinical trials.
Goal: Design a complete, high-fidelity prototype of Mimik’s end-to-end user experience and prepare the team for usability testing and clinical trial readiness.
Outcomes:
Built and refined high-fidelity prototypes aligned with brand guidelines
Finalized key user flows and information architecture
Designed the SUS-based usability study for upcoming clinical trials
Helped configure Mimik’s Jira workflow to support development at scale
Reflection: This project deepened my experience designing for clinical environments and balancing user needs with regulatory requirements. It strengthened my ability to structure complex workflows, prepare products for testing, and collaborate closely with founders and engineering teams.
Project Deep Dive
List of Terms
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Background
Mimik Studio is a healthtech start-up founded in collaboration with enFocus, a non-profit in South Bend, Indiana. The founder of Mimik is a speech-language pathologist who started building Mimik because of the potential for automation to make a huge impact in the clinical space.
In particular, she recognized how SLPs are constantly balancing time and accuracy when completing the manual transcription of patient sessions into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This is a part of their daily workload, often taking hours at the end of their days to go back, listen to their sessions, and manually write out their transcript for analysis. This is known as the phoneme to grapheme conversion.
Problem
” SLPs spend a large portion of their time devoted to manual transcription of sessions into the International Phonetic Alphabet. This time could be better spent providing patients with treatment, crafting treatment plans, and conducting patient outreach. Automating this process could prevent transcription errors and prevent abnormalities from going undetected.”
When I joined the project, the problems that Mimik sought to solve were already well-defined. We knew the amount of time it took away from an SLP's day to manually transcribe sessions. We also knew that these prolonged sessions of focus increased the potential for errors in the transcription, based on our knowledge of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and vigilance decrement.
The team had moved past the discovery phase, completing user interviews with other SLPs and synthesizing the results. They had also finished a low-fidelity prototype of the most foundational pages for the application and started the development of the LLM that would power the transcription. My role was to continue working on the design, consulting the completed research.
As I began this process, I also recognized an opportunity: there was no true product management software in place. It was difficult to untangle where the different teams were in their processes, and we even struggled discussing which features belonged to which version of the project. I then also decided to take on a product management role to implement a Jira board that could lead the team to an Agile framework.
Goals & Tasks
Design Approach
Screen Designs
Patient List
Patient Profile Creation
Conducting Sessions
Session Reports
Outcomes
A Strong Base for Product Management
By the end of the internship, I successfully:
Low-Fidelity to High-Fidelity:
Moved the prototype from its low-fidelity to high-fidelity state. This included implementing the company’s brand guidelines, finalizing the user flows to match the fully-fleshed out information architecture, and consulting the 10 Usability Heuristics to patch any usability issues that could arise.
Usability Study Design:
Worked with the team focused on clinical trials to design a study that would utilize the System Usability Scale (SUS) to assess the application’s performance.
Jira Implementation:
Worked with the founder and members of the development team to configure a Jira board that would meet the company’s needs as it grows from a minimum viable product in clinical trials, to a beta version, to a future version.
Reflection
This project was incredibly beneficial for me as a designer as it gave me hands-on experience working in an incredibly interesting field. I loved knowing that the work I was doing would contribute to a product that would improve the professional lives of healthcare providers. Further, the application has the potential to improve the lives of patients as they go their sessions with more of an emphasis on treatment. I got to work within complex constraints that allowed me to consider new solutions and possibilities for the design.