An Interview with Sr Product Designer Hailey Tannenbaum
Innovative healthtech companies are on the rise creating products and services to transform the way healthcare is delivered. I had an opportunity to learn more about how design and UX play a role in healthtech through a conversation with Hailey Tannenbaum, a Senior Product Designer at Tempus.
Hello! Can you please introduce yourself and explain what Tempus does?
Hi, my name is Hailey Tannenbaum! I am a Senior Product Designer at Tempus, where I’ve worked for over 3 years. I studied Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and have a unique background coming into product design.
Tempus is a technology company based in Chicago that is tackling big problems in healthcare. When I started we were mainly focused on solving problems in oncology, but have since broadened our sights to infectious disease, diabetes, mental health, and cardiology. At our core we believe that more data = better treatments for patients.
What is the role of a product designer in a healthtech company?
The role of a product designer at Tempus is really unique, in that we really own the full stack of design needs for each product space we work in. We’re not only responsible for the UI/UX of the products within our domain, but we also play a role in designing the processes and the way teams work together.
I think when people think of a ‘product designer’ they think oh, you build websites and apps. We definitely do that (and love it!), but product design is not just limited to what happens on a website or an app — it encompasses all of the interactions we have with a specific user group, which could include things like an email, a sample collection kit, interactions with customer success reps, etc. Even when building the tools for our internal teams, we have to keep in mind how they communicate with other teams, how they need to balance speed against going deep into the specific biology of each patient, and now even what it means for them to be using our tools remotely.
Product design is especially relevant in healthtech, because the ultimate goal of what we do as designers is to make something easier for our user. Having cancer, or being worried about COVID, or struggling with mental health, are all really high-stress situations. The last thing a patient wants to do is fumble through a confusing onboarding experience, or try to understand technical scientific jargon. Or if you’re a provider, you want help digesting a lot of deep information about a test result so that you can have an educated conversation with your patient in the short 15 minutes you have with them that day.
At Tempus we really focus on moving healthcare forward in terms of both the look and feel as well as the usability of the products we make. But it’s also important that we’re empathetic to the exact needs of every user we interact with, and make sure that that is the driving force behind our design decisions.
As a product designer, who do you collaborate with on a daily basis, what skills do you primarily use, and do you have any favorite tools?
I rely on my product managers and engineers every day to build useful products. My product manager is my partner in prioritizing both the user’s needs alongside the goals of the business. My engineers are tactical partners who make my work real and help me understand the architectural and technical implications of my designs. We also have people embedded in each team with deep subject matter expertise, be that variant science or machine learning. A lot of what I do daily is translate the needs of the user into designs or other artifacts to help enable the work of these types of stakeholders.
Like many product designers, I primarily use Sketch and Invision to create and share my designs. I would say a favorite tool of mine is an app called Pendo, that we use to understand user behavior in our apps and to build data for user research. It’s really powerful, as it allows PMs and designers to dig deep into the specific questions they have of users and track the success of feature changes or new flows within an app.
Funny enough, I would say the skill I use the most nowadays is designing a good meeting. I think to successfully work remotely, we all have to consistently make sure we are overcommunicating and that nothing is lost in translation. So much of design is rooted in good communication. I’ve found that the artifacts designers create, like journey maps and low-fi wireframes, are great at building alignment across many stakeholders and enabling teams to make the best decisions quickly.
From your experience at Tempus, what are some of the challenges facing product designers in the healthcare space?
I think my favorite, and the most challenging, part of working at Tempus is that I get to interface with people with deep scientific knowledge. Many of these subject matter experts are the nicest people, and will sit down and answer any question you have. They might also have never had the chance to work with a designer before, so these are great opportunities to advocate for the role of design and how we can help in ways they might not expect.
In order to move as fast as we do, we need to have a lot of respect for each other. I get the chance to sit in a room with some of the best minds in their field, and I have never doubted that they would extend the same respect to me and my expertise as I do to them. Ultimately it’s the focus on the company’s mission, as well as not letting egos get in the way, that allow us to build the best version of our products.
Building our COVID-19 patient app is a great example of balancing good design with what healthcare needs at that moment. It’s rare to work on a project where the deadlines are literally set by a world-wide pandemic, which was both a challenge and a unique opportunity. The team had to work incredibly hard at an intense speed to get our products out, which forced our design and product team to make hard decisions quickly. However, the focus on the mission of Tempus enabled our team to rapidly prioritize what to build, how best to build it, and most of all expand access and help more patients.
What barriers do you see patients facing and how is Tempus helping to solve those challenges through design?
I’ve been leading the first patient-facing product that we’ve launched at Tempus, our COVID-19 mobile app. This is a great example of how Tempus sees a problem in the healthcare space, and mobilizes quickly to solve it. Within a few months we were able to design, develop and launch this app to enable patients to receive their COVID test results quickly and conveniently. It was a meaningful project for me, as we really could feel the immediate impact we were having on this horrible event happening in the world around us.
It’s been really cool to think about how we can utilize this opportunity of our first direct-to-patient product to develop a deeper connection with our patients in the long term. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how we can build upon this result delivery app to bring even more value to our patients. Tempus is uniquely situated to bring the power of large-scale data to problems like infectious disease, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other things we can solve in this space.
Can you speak to any current trends in healthcare product development and explain how Tempus is playing an important role in the advancement of healthtech?
I think the pandemic has forced a new trend in what it means to build products for people, both in and out of healthcare. We have seen a lot of calls for honesty and transparency within the tech world this year. I think there’s not a lot of tolerance for fluff anymore — people just want products that work well for them and provide something meaningful to their lives. I think the theme of the past year has been stripping back to the essentials, both in life and in work.
Tempus interestingly has always had to toe the line between providing what is useful for healthcare today, while also pushing our partners to think a little bit more in the future. For example, this year we launched a scalable, robust mobile app with a goal of delivering COVID-19 test results simply and securely to our patients when the country desperately needed more tests. We also launched Tempus ONE, a project that tests the boundaries of what AI in healthcare means. [Learn more about that project, currently in beta, here]. I believe we’ve learned that when we stick to our goal of doing what is best for all patients in the future, we can find out how to build useful solutions for both today and tomorrow.
Is there anything else you would like to share related to healthcare design, user experience, or work at Tempus?
I have loved working at Tempus, as I get to learn about so many things outside of my field. I like to joke that I got a free minor in genetics! We really foster a community of curiosity here, and it has allowed me to work on projects I feel very lucky to have been a part of. Working in healthtech means that you get to wake up every day and know that the work you do is having a direct impact on people’s lives.
I would love to give a shout out to my Tempus design team, who are truly a wonderful, talented, and supportive group of people. If you’re interested in joining us, you can check out open positions here!
Tempus is on a mission to redefine how genomic data is used in a clinical setting. Their goal is for each patient to benefit from the treatment of others who came before them by providing physicians with tools that learn as more data is gathered. Tempus is making precision medicine a reality by applying AI in healthcare, deriving insights from their expansive library of clinical data and molecular data. They enable physicians to make real-time, data-driven decisions to deliver personalized care and targeted therapies for patients through an analytical machine learning platform.
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