Eye Surgery Calculations Reimagined
An Irish clinic specializing in advanced laser eye surgery had built a proprietary ML-driven formula for calculating intraocular lens power. Their goal: bring it to surgeons worldwide through a dedicated web platform.
Duration
4 months
My role
UX Designer: discovery, end-to-end platform design, design system
Design team
Solo Designer
Domain
Healthcare
A Complex Challenge
This wasn't a typical UX project. The platform had to be precise enough for surgeons making critical decisions and simple enough to adopt across clinics with very different workflows and technical setups.
Every friction point was a barrier to adoption. Every moment of clarity was a chance to establish the formula as a credible global standard.
Navigating Discovery Without Users
Direct access to surgeons wasn't available, so I found another way in — remote interviews with medical experts, collaboration with a business analyst, and close study of documentation and calculation workflows.
What emerged:
Surgeons needed clarity and speed — every unnecessary click was a barrier.
Comparing formulas in existing tools was cumbersome and error-prone.
Filters and visualizations were essential to building trust in the results.
Even without traditional user access, the foundation was solid enough to move forward with confidence.
Designing for Clarity
The platform brought five calculation methods into one workflow — something no existing surgical tool offered.
The hardest part was the data visualization. Predictive histograms comparing multiple formulas across variables like lens type, axial length, and corneal astigmatism were too dense in early iterations. I simplified across multiple rounds, reviewing each version with medical experts until the data felt readable under real working conditions — not just in a design review.
Core flows:
Data entry — lens types, eye measurements, target refraction, and eye status
Constant optimization — default, historical data adjustment, or ML model training
Visual comparisons — predictive histograms with filters for key surgical variables
Exportable results — PDFs and Excel files for quick sharing
The goal throughout: make surgeons feel like the platform was a trusted assistant, not another tool to fight with.
Moving Fast Without Losing Consistency
To move quickly, I created a UI kit and living design library, defined interaction rules, and synced weekly with developers. Seeing the platform come together quickly yet consistently was one of the most rewarding parts of the project.
Component Library
Early Success
Within months of launch:
4 clinics adopted the platform with 200+ users onboarded.
Surgeons could run accurate IOL calculations and optimize constants without friction.
The client successfully introduced its formula to eye care professionals worldwide, gaining global validation
Reflections
The data visualization was the most humbling part of this project. What looked clear to me in early iterations was still too dense for someone making a surgical decision under time pressure. It took more rounds than I expected to get it right — and that patience ended up being the whole job.
Complexity doesn't have to feel complex. But getting there takes longer than it looks.
