Guided scanning walkthroughs aim to take much of the burden of scanning and image capture off of medical practitioners by providing more education and instruction. Meant for all ultrasound scanners—from novices in medical school to experts with decades of experience—this tool is intended to provide a clear pathway to clinical decision-making through clear and easy steps.

Based on industry knowledge, research, and expert medical guidance, we recognized the barriers to learning ultrasound. Specifically, the lack of personal motivation and development of certain motor skills prevent people from adopting the practice. Focusing on solvable problems, we created a tool that made the entry point to ultrasound easy, simple, and accessible through an educational framework that could be applied to different kinds of exams.

Product management originally suggested a plan of 5 weeks to go through the entire discovery and design process. Design led a proposal, with research considered, which would accomplish multiple rounds of work with an iterative approach while still getting to market quickly. This proposal accounted for the complexities of a scalable framework and content development—two very different problems. Learning from previous projects, we understood that doctors expect to spend a lot of time reading, but the content must be specific, precise, and valuable.

The business competes with cart-based ultrasound machines that are more sophisticated and more capable, so the value of Butterfly tools always needs to be very clear and upfront. We challenged ourselves to compress tons of medical knowledge into a single content panel with the objectives of efficiency and saving time. We also used what worked from competitor frameworks so we wouldn’t disrupt doctors’ mental models; we hoped this would give the tool a fighting chance at adoption and continued usage.

As an MVP solution, we set a time to completion per exam of 5-6 minutes which accounted for increased difficulty on cardiac scans. We set this as our metric for success until we could view real-world usage across multiple medical environments. Post-MVP projects would include just in time education, more comprehensive documentation in the exam summary, a fully integrated content and image solution, and potentially a billing workflow.