SENSE
Clinical Trials Control Centre
A real-time visibility and decision-making system for global clinical trial operations across 50+ countries.
Global drug development is a complex operational ecosystem.
Clinical trials involve countries, sites, patients, milestones, risks, budgets, dependencies, systems, and decisions. The challenge was not simply to design another dashboard, but to create a shared operational view that could help people understand what was happening, where attention was needed, and how to act.
SENSE became a NASA-style control centre concept for clinical trial management: a system designed to make complex global trial operations more visible, more understandable, and more actionable.
Trial operations needed clarity across complexity.
The ecosystem included many roles, systems, data sources, operating procedures, and decision moments. Teams needed a way to move beyond fragmented information and toward a more coherent view of clinical trial status, risk, progress, and priority.
The design challenge was to translate complexity into something people could actually use: not just by showing more data, but by helping users understand what mattered, what required attention, and what decisions could follow.
Research-driven design across global drug development.
The work combined discovery research, stakeholder engagement, design thinking, usability testing, product design, and design-system thinking. Research helped identify user needs, operational pain points, mental models, decision-making patterns, and the hidden dependencies behind trial management work.
The program involved hundreds of interviews, more than ten personas, recurrent usability testing, and in-person workshops with more than fifty participants in Basel. It also connected to the Maya design system for trial management.
Understand the ecosystem
Research across roles, workflows, operational needs, systems, risks and decision points in global trial management.
Frame the right problems
Translate research into personas, needs, tensions, opportunity areas, and product principles for better trial visibility.
Design the control centre
Create a real-time operational interface focused on clarity, prioritization, monitoring, and decision support.
Test, align, and scale
Use workshops, usability testing, and design-system principles to align stakeholders and evolve the product.
A control-centre experience for clinical trial decision-making.
SENSE translated global trial complexity into a visual, operational decision-making environment. The goal was to help people see the state of clinical trials more clearly, identify what needed attention, and support better decisions across a large distributed organization.
The interface combined trial status, geography, milestones, enrollment, objectives, timelines, risk signals, and operational views into a coherent visual system. The work included the principal clinical trial management app design, recurring usability testing, personas, workshop facilitation, and design-system foundations for trial management.
A flagship design program with global visibility.
SENSE became one of the most visible design-driven transformation initiatives inside Novartis drug development, combining research, product design, executive storytelling, and operational decision support.
“Vlad’s contributions to the SENSE project in 2018 have been outstanding. His ability to translate complex operational ideas into simple and impactful visualizations is highly commendable.”Stephen Voice, Business Lead SENSE
