← All work

INTERSPOND / CROWN PLATFORM

Taking a 20-year-old manual process digital, in four months.

I led design on Crown, Interspond’s first digital product: a marketplace where research sites find clinical trials and Interspond’s team manages them. Phase I had to be ready for an industry conference in October.

Role
Lead designer at Headway
Timeline
4 months (2023)
Project details
Team
Design head, 2 developers, 3 client stakeholders
I owned
Brand, UX and UI, design system, website, docs and handoff
Live
interspondcrown.com, 140+ sites on it today
The Crown homepage: Connecting sponsors with sites, and sites with studies

A clinical trials marketplace, conference-ready in four months.

fewer clicks and less search time to find the right study
60%Faster
less time to link related studies, with new automation
55%Automated
of Interspond’s team adopted automated linking
80%Adopted
from kickoff to a conference-ready Phase I
4 moOn time

The problem

Since 2003, Interspond matched research sites with clinical trials by hand. It worked, but it couldn’t scale.

What I did

Led design end to end: brand, design system, a two-sided product for sites and admins, the website and handoff.

The result

Phase I was ready for the October conference, and finding and linking studies took less than half the time.

Map the real process first.

I ran a kickoff with Interspond’s stakeholders to agree what success looked like, then mapped how their team actually worked, step by step. That map became the backbone of Crown’s flows, and our reference whenever scope started to grow.

App flow covering sign-up, verification, account info and in-network steps
The app flow we built with stakeholders, from sign-up to working inside the network.

A design system from day one.

With one designer and two developers, we couldn’t design every button from scratch. I set the look with a moodboard exercise, then adapted the Shipwright UI kit into Crown’s own system, so developers built from the same components I designed with.

Interspond moodboard next to the Interspond UI kit cover
The moodboard that set the direction, and the UI kit it became.

Two products in one.

Research sites find a study, check the criteria and sign up. Interspond’s team sees every interested site and moves each one forward.

A study from both sides: details, the Interested action and agreement steps, and the interested-sites table
A study from both sides: details, the Interested action and agreement steps, and the interested-sites table.

Explore wide, then commit.

The homepage had one job: say what Crown does in a line and get people started. I explored several directions before landing on a clear promise, one call to action and proof in numbers.

Before: homepage explorations
Before: the directions we explored.
After: the final Crown homepage
After: the homepage we shipped.

Leading a first digital product.

I planned the work in two-week sprints, with a rhythm that kept a client new to digital products involved without slowing us down. The hard parts were familiar: wanting everything at once, and scope that kept growing.

15 min

Daily stand-up

1 hr

Design reviews with developers

1 hr

Stakeholder feedback

1 hr

Retro every sprint

What people said.

Feedback from users testing the Phase I prototype, and from the developer who built it.

“Love the UI, and the experience is so easy.”
Trials managerAdmin side
“Clarity on steps during onboarding is super helpful!”
Research siteUser side
“Headway has done an amazing job in just a few months. Can’t wait to show it to the world!”
InterspondStakeholder

Taran has done a great job on the Interspond project with the short turnaround time for their initial conference. His design mockups have been great to work off of, and he consistently updates the design with new information from the client.

Colton PlumeyLead Developer

Where it is now.

I wrote the roadmap for Phase II and helped Interspond hire the people to carry it forward. Crown is still live today.

sites partnered, shown on Crown’s homepage
140+Live
trials listed on Crown
4,350+Live
Next case studyA Figma design system course that sold 25+ seats through organic marketing.Read case study