ClinRev

Overview

Role: Lead UX Researcher (with cross-functional product & design team)
Company: Natera
Timeline: Discovery to launch and adoption tracking (2024-2025)
Goal: Redesign the manual clinical review workflow to streamline how genetic counselors and lab directors review and approve genetic test reports, reducing turnaround time and error risk while enabling scalable growth across women’s health, oncology, and organ health lines of business.

Context & Challenge

In 2024, Natera delivered 2.9 million genetic testing results across women’s health, oncology, and organ health. About 20 percent—roughly 585,000 reports—needed manual review by genetic counselors and lab directors.

The review workflow was slow and fragmented, leading to subpar turnaround times.

Natera sought a streamlined, user-centered solution to simplify the process and accelerate report delivery.

Team

Our product team was comprised of:

  • Product Manager

  • Product Designer whom I collaborated with daily

  • Developers located primarily in Serbia

Research, synthesis and strategy

Discovery

  • Engaged 15 end-users, 8 SMEs and 6 leaders across various departments and business units

  • 2,000+ hours of user interviews and live shadowing with genetic counselors and lab directors

  • 1 cross-functional vision workshop ith project leaders and stakeholders to align on goals, constraints, and success metrics

 

Sensemaking

Employed thematic analysis to make sense of the information collected throughout discovery

Mapped out key flows and data model

Mapped out user roles to queues, statuses and actions needed at each status

Synthesis and Findings

  • Underutilized Expertise & Repetitive Work

    Users’ domain expertise was being overshadowed by repetitive tasks, fragmented workflows, and inconsistent command structures. These inefficiencies reduced productivity and contributed to user frustration.

  • Clear Role Definition & Permission Structures

    We identified distinct user groups and mapped their responsibilities, which informed the design of role-specific dashboards and permission settings—helping users focus only on what matters to them.

  • Streamlined Review Workflows

    By mapping key review processes, we revealed opportunities to consolidate tools and eliminate redundant steps. This enabled engineering to build a unified workflow that was both intuitive and efficient.

  • Error-Prone Touchpoints & Manual Handoff

    Frequent bottlenecks and error-prone handoffs were uncovered in critical interactions. These insights led to the introduction of automated validations and more structured approval flows, reducing the likelihood of costly mistakes.

Leveraged the Distributed Cognition framework to analyze how information flows across people, tools, and environments. This helped clarify user roles and surface task dependencies essential to supporting the end-to-end workflow.

Synthesized user research into two primary personas:

  • Genetic Counselors, responsible for the majority of manual review tasks within the workflow.

  • Lab Directors, who focus on reviewing and approving finalized reports.

 
 

Persona-Specific User Journeys

Created detailed user journeys for each persona to map their tasks, goals, pain points, and decision-making moments across the workflow. These journeys highlighted critical handoffs between Genetic Counselors and Lab Directors, helping the team design for smoother collaboration and reduce friction at key transition points.

End-to-End Workflow & Information Architecture Mapping

Mapped the complete user flow to ensure a coherent experience. This work provided a shared blueprint for the design and engineering teams, aligning interface decisions with user goals and system logic.

 
 
 

End to End Walkthrough

Collaborated closely with designer in conducting iterative testing throughout the design process including usability testing studies which yielded positive results.

Impact

Turnaround time reduced by 50%.

Single integrated tool replaced multiple legacy systems, cutting context-switching and training overhead.

Higher user satisfaction from counselors and lab directors, reflected in positive usability and UAT scores.

Reflection & Next Steps

This project reinforced the value of pairing deep qualitative inquiry with rapid iteration to solve complex operational problems. Next, we plan to extend the unified review framework to other product lines and develop analytics dashboards that surface real-time performance data for leadership.