Case study

Clinical Conductor

Consolidating three overlapping workflows into one flexible experience.

Role: Product Design Lead
Scope: Visit completion workflows
Org: Advarra · Clinical Conductor

A new financial architecture exposed the limits of three legacy workflows. The easy path was a fourth one. Instead we treated the requirement as an opportunity to simplify — collapsing three into a single flexible experience.

Challenge

Three overlapping visit-completion workflows had accumulated over time — confusing to learn, inconsistent in behavior, and costly to maintain.

Approach

Use a new transaction-based financial architecture as the catalyst to consolidate — not to add a fourth workflow.

Impact

One flexible workflow replaced three: simpler training, fewer errors, and meaningfully less technical debt.

Fig. A Case · Visit Completion

Consolidate instead of extend

Before

01 Workflow A
02 Workflow B
03 Workflow C

Research insight
"A fourth workflow would compound the complexity. Consolidate the three instead."

After

01 One flexible workflow
02 Configurable to every case

Fig. B Case · Visit Completion

Outcomes

3 → 1 Workflows consolidated

One flexible experience replaced three overlapping ones.

1 path For coordinators to learn

New users learn a single approach instead of three.

Less debt Maintenance burden

One implementation to maintain and enhance, not three.

Overview

Clinical research coordinators spend a significant portion of their time managing patient visits and ensuring study activities are completed accurately and in compliance with protocol requirements.

Within Clinical Conductor, multiple workflows had evolved over time to support different visit completion scenarios. While each workflow solved a specific problem, the result was a fragmented experience that required users to learn multiple approaches for accomplishing similar tasks.

The project focused on consolidating these overlapping workflows into a single, flexible experience that could support multiple use cases while simplifying training, reducing errors, and improving maintainability.

Why This Matters

Many enterprise systems accumulate complexity over time as new functionality is added to solve immediate needs. While each addition may be justified individually, the result is often multiple ways to accomplish similar tasks — creating confusion for users and maintenance challenges for development teams.

This project demonstrates my ability to identify opportunities for consolidation, simplify complex workflows, and create solutions that improve outcomes for users while reducing long-term product complexity.

Problem

Clinical Conductor was introducing a new transaction-based financial architecture designed to improve how study finances were managed and tracked. While the new financial model created significant opportunities, it also exposed limitations in the existing patient visit completion workflows.

Over time, the platform had accumulated three separate workflows for completing patient visits. Each had been created to address specific business needs, but together they introduced user confusion, training complexity, inconsistent behavior, technical debt, and increased maintenance costs.

As the team evaluated how to support the new financial architecture, it became clear that simply adapting the existing workflows would continue to compound complexity. One option was to introduce a fourth workflow specifically designed around the new transaction model. Instead, we saw an opportunity to rethink the problem entirely: a single flexible workflow capable of supporting multiple use cases while enabling the benefits of the new transaction-based financial system.

Constraints

Diverse use cases. The existing workflows supported different scenarios and user needs, making consolidation challenging.

Existing customer expectations. Users had established habits built around the existing workflows.

Regulatory environment. Clinical research workflows require accuracy, traceability, and compliance.

Backward compatibility. The new solution needed to support existing business processes while creating a simpler future state.

Technical complexity. Consolidation required balancing UX improvements with implementation realities and technical constraints.

Approach

The introduction of the new transaction-based financial architecture created an opportunity to address long-standing workflow complexity. Rather than layering additional functionality onto existing processes, we evaluated whether the underlying workflow model still made sense.

Rather than introducing a fourth workflow, we analyzed the existing three to identify shared patterns, common tasks, unique requirements, and opportunities for simplification. Through that analysis it became clear that many tasks were fundamentally the same despite being presented through different interfaces — revealing a more unified model that could support multiple scenarios through configuration and flexibility rather than separate workflows.

The result was a single flexible workflow capable of supporting multiple use cases, balancing simplicity with the flexibility to accomplish specialized tasks when necessary. Throughout, I worked with stakeholders to evaluate tradeoffs and keep discussions focused on user outcomes, operational efficiency, and long-term sustainability — consolidation efforts often require overcoming attachment to existing solutions.

Outcome

The project successfully consolidated three overlapping workflows into a single flexible experience. Users no longer needed to navigate multiple approaches for similar tasks, a more consistent workflow reduced opportunities for confusion and process mistakes, and new users could learn a single approach rather than three. The organization could maintain and enhance one solution rather than supporting three separate implementations, and users experienced more predictable behavior throughout the application.

Reflection

One lesson from this project was that major platform changes often create opportunities to solve problems that have existed for years. The immediate business goal was implementing a new transaction-based financial system, but simply adding support for that capability would have preserved the complexity users were already experiencing.

By treating the initiative as an opportunity to rethink the workflow itself, we delivered the benefits of the new financial model while also simplifying the user experience, reducing technical debt, and improving maintainability.

Some of the most valuable product improvements come from recognizing when a new requirement is actually an opportunity to simplify rather than add.