Covidence

Better health knowledge, faster, at a global scale

Covidence is a not-for-profit organisation that enables researchers to contribute to the global pool of scientific health knowledge 30% faster than without it. With better evidence comes better knowledge, and with better knowledge comes healthier humans. Covidence’s mission is to shape the world’s knowledge and, with Matt’s help, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

As the foundational designer, Matt helped Covidence become a revenue-generating business, unlocking its ability to hire its own full-time team across the world. Inheriting a very early prototype, Matt used his exceptional research, design, product and strategy skills to iteratively shape the product into the one that’s now used by more than 200 academic institutions around the world including Harvard, Yale, and Oxford

♥️ I'm proud of...

  • Helping scale Covidence from less than 100 users to over 150,000 users, globally
  • Helping the Australian Stroke Foundation reduce the time between guideline updates (working evidence for practitioners) from 7 years to under 3 months
  • Using research and design to discover and implement product/market fit and become self-sustaining
  • Beginning with a team of three, left the business when Covidence became a globally distributed team of 15
  • Unifying the organisational vision of the customer/s: Globally scaled research operations and team engagement
  • Playing a Creative Director role on the Covidence global re-brand
  • Supporting funding proposals for multi-million dollar grants

Design methods

  • User interviews
  • Contextual enquiry
  • Taskflow modelling
  • Persona development
  • Workshop facilitation
  • Prototyping (pen/paper)
  • Interaction design
  • Visual design & Creative direction
  • Hypothesis-led development
  • Commercial and pricing modelling
Foundational design for scale

From 100 users to 150,000 consumers globally

The more sophisticated and nuanced your understanding of your customer, the more likely you are to solve their specific problems and win their hearts in the process.

When Matt joined the Covidence team, there were less than one hundred people using the software. These people were mostly hand-picked by the founder – an early adopter group who agreed to trial the software and provide sporadic feedback on how to improve it. It was, in it’s essence, still a research project.

But, with a founder committed to the eventual commercialisation of the product, and with a deep respect and understanding of the importance of evidence-based decision-making, Matt set his sights on getting a deeper understanding of the types of users Covidence already had, and some generative research on the ones that could be.

Keeping things lightweight: a common language for how the business refers to it’s current and future customers is critical for making better product strategy decisions.
Commercialising research

B2B2C product-led growth

Once the flywheel of early problem/solution fit is spinning, the next step in ensuring it’s sustainability is to discover a commercial model that ensures the long term finances of the business. Working directly with the founder, engineer, and product managers, Matt once again used his deep expertise in research to understand Covidence’s unique market:

  • Who would pay?
  • What would they pay for?
  • How much would they pay?
  • For how long would they pay?
  • What would this revenue unlock for Covidence?

 

Above: A simplified approach to using Lean Design to invent a pricing strategy. A key ingredient here is what the business revenue needs to be for the business to survive.

 

Whilst Covidence began its journey as a B2C platform, the research carried out by Matt provided clear direction that the easiest, fastest way to scale the platform and support it in the long-term was to provide a service to the Academic Institutions where most of the consumers of the product were working within. This meant that Covidence would grow best through by supplementing their Sales-led growth strategy with a product-led one and so hiring a solid growth team (marketing and data analytics) became a priority.

 

Above: Covidence supports low cost growth (and good outcomes for its mission) by leveraging a high value product with network effects

 

Matt and Julian (Founder of Covidence) review design concepts for a new feature in Covidence.

Creative direction and brand development

How it feels matters

Over the years, Matt used his extensive background in branding and marketing and communications to support multi-million dollar grant and funding proposals for Covidence whilst iterating the brand to a global standard. Colloborating remotely with designers in New York and developers in Melbourne, Australia, Covidence’s 2019 brand refresh ensured that its visual presence reflected the high-quality reputation that Covidence gained for its software platform whilst, at the same time, leaving behind the feeling of being a bootstrapped tech startup here to shake up a stuffy and conservative industry.

Above: Co-ordinating with New York and Melbourne, the 2019 Covidence brand refresh was highly goal oriented.

 

Above: Brand Application to the Covidence website. With increased understanding of the users and their needs, the Covidence website was designed with much greater purpose: to activate and retain as many visitors as possible.

 

Evidence in a post-truth world

More about Covidence

Systematic reviews are a niche, complicated business, but it’s the gold-standard we have so far for ensuring that health practitioners can make the best available decisions on how to prevent and treat human illness. If you’re interested in learning more about Covidence, and this very interesting domain visit the website.