The latest version of Studio marks a significant step forward in empowering healthcare professionals and developers to build and manage clinical applications with ease. This redesign isn’t merely a cosmetic update – it’s a strategic overhaul aimed at addressing the challenges of a growing platform and ensuring a seamless, intuitive experience for all users. Before we begin, we would like to thank our community and end-users for all the valuable feedback that helps us improve their user experience.
Why redesign Studio?
Studio was initially conceived as a form builder based on EHR templates, but it quickly evolved to accommodate lists, dashboards, and even entire multi-page modules. This organic growth, coupled with the addition of tools like AQL Builder, API editor, and Archetype Designer, expanded Studio’s capabilities, transforming it into a comprehensive environment for building healthcare applications.
However, this rapid expansion brought complexity. To ensure Studio remains a powerful yet accessible tool, a more robust and transparent structure was needed to organise projects, files, and tools. This became especially critical as Studio transitions to a SaaS model, demanding scalability and efficient user management.
Redesign of the working environment
Through our regular interactions and workshops with our partners and customers, we together strive to maintain our reputation for software products with exceptional design and superior user experiences was a key consideration. Based on their feedback, Studio redesign focuses on several key aspects to enhance the user experience:
- Tailored working environment: The modular structure of Studio enables custom configurations tailored to individual user needs. Users can select the tools relevant to their roles, creating a more focused and efficient working environment.
- Clear and transparent organisation: Functionalities and tools are organised in a clear and transparent manner. The new version provides space for management tools and improves the awareness of the currently selected project.
- Streamlined navigation: Navigation is now open to accommodate more tools, and supporting modules are placed in intuitive spots.
- Simplified project content presentation: Project content is presented in an organised and transparent way.
- Transparent structure for complex content: The redesign provides a better structure that allows further growth of Studio in a controlled way, as well as better structure for pages, forms and widgets, linked resources, such as API calls and AQL queries.
- Smoother learning curve and greater adoption: The new design aims to make Studio more approachable also for new users while encouraging the adoption of its diverse tools.
- Simplified access control: A new User Management module allows for easier management of user permissions, ensuring that data security and appropriate access levels are set without heavy administration efforts and too many clicks.
- Future growth enablement: The revamped structure is designed to accommodate the addition of new tools and modules seamlessly as the Studio evolves and grows further
Navigating the new Studio environment
In order to have a more personalised environment and user-oriented navigation, we had to completely change the working space, introducing different hierarchies, relationships between modules and user flows overall. The redesigned Studio environment introduces a new structure organised around different levels:
- Administration level: This level provides access to administration tools and a list of user projects.
- Project level: Upon selecting a project, users enter the Project Level, where the menu changes to reflect the specific project. The opened project is displayed in the header of the menu.
- Project dashboard: This serves as the entry point for regular users, offering useful data and shortcuts to frequently used tools, recent files, and important notices.
- Supporting content: All supporting content for building forms and summaries, including templates, is now accessible in a dedicated section.
- Tools: A dedicated page lists all available tools within Studio, allowing users to launch them in the same window and return to the Studio environment upon exit.
- Membership: This page facilitates the management of project members and their permissions through defined roles.
- Marketplace: The Marketplace remains largely unchanged, with plans for future integration into the new structure and publishing new content on a daily basis.
- Settings: This page provides access to project administration settings.
In addition, system notifications are displayed on a generic banner on the dashboard to communicate new deployment dates, maintenance information and other important information to keep our users up to date with all the latest changes.
A foundation for continued growth
Looking forward, Better is committed to enhancing Studio further, with a focus on:
- Expanding functionality: Introducing new tools and modules to address a wider range of healthcare application development needs.
- Improving collaboration: Facilitating seamless collaboration among users with enhanced content sharing and access control.
- Enhancing the user experience: Continuously refining the interface and navigation based on user feedback to ensure an intuitive and efficient workflow.
- AI-Powered assistance: Integrating AI-driven features, such as the AI Assistant for AQL queries, to further streamline development and empower users.
By prioritising user experience, scalability, and innovation, we are confident that the redesigned Studio will empower healthcare organisations to build the next generation of digital health solutions.
