Sheba Mathew. UX Research, Design, and Engineering.
User Researcher and Product Strategist
specializing in digital health, medical technology, and robotics
NOW
User Experience Researcher at Manta Product Development
Head of Product for Jamii Life
THEN
Researcher at Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School, Partners, and Cleveland Clinic
Harvard University A.B. in Anthropology with a focus in Life Sciences
01.
WORK
USER RESEARCH GUIDES
Created for Harvard Medical School Biodesign
ROLE
User Research Strategist
ABOUT
Proper techniques for conducting user research interviews are crucial to amassing quality data. As a user researcher, I find well-conducted semi-structured interviews excel at discvoering unmet needs and opportunities for product improvement.
OUTCOMES
Assessed physicians’ pain management practices for post-op joint replacement patients. Used data to propose a novel prescribing module platform.
In a digital world, the best user research is still supported by anthropological practices for cultural understanding and need-finding.
CANCER TREATMENT CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT APP
Created for the Yale CBIT Healthcare Hackathon
ROLE
Product Manager & UX Designer
ABOUT
Physicians currently use a maze of PDF treatment protocol documents to determine the proper treatment for their patients. This proposed app design enables doctors to quickly search and navigate these treatment protocols for faster, more accurate care.
OUTCOMES
Created functional interface that reduced the time physicians took to navigate cancer treatment pathways by 40%. This product was enthusiastically endorsed by four advising physicians.
Products rooted in an understanding of people and community results in technology that facilitates meaningful connection.
JAMII LIFE
Created for Jamii Life, a Harvard & MIT-backed startup and winner of the 2020 Skoll Venture Award
ROLE
Head of Product
ABOUT
Jamii Life provides high quality, tech-enabled home caregiving for South Africans. The Jamii app prioritizes maintaining inter-family connections throughout the caregiving process, and provides patients and payers with a seamless appointment-management interface.
OUTCOMES
Advised and oversaw research strategy, including ethnographic discovery work and development of materials to concept-test prototypes with 230 health workers, improving requirements and acceptance criteria.
Own product roadmap and guided engineers and designers in building a PWA prototype and structuring backend databases using 1900 records.
Developing engaging products is best done by iteratively inviting users into your process in as many creative ways as possible.
USER RESEARCH STRATEGY
Created for Sabeti Lab Broad Institute-ISTH
ROLE
User Researcher
ABOUT
Recommended an iterative user research strategy to develop a Lassa Fever app that streamlines patient data into an easy-to-use interface, optimized for provider accessibility and legibility.
OUTCOMES
Enabled clinical staff to better track and visualize patient condition over time. Delivered workflows and wireframes, in additional to functional prototype.
02.
ABOUT
Sheba Mathew
Sheba is a user experience researcher at Manta Product Development, where she leverages mixed-methods research to help companies rapidly unearth customer insights and develop human-centered products, with a focus on medical devices and digital health. To define and validate user personas and feature requirements, she draws on a variety of digital and in-person tools, including contextual inquiry, interviews, diary studies, surveys, digital experiments, and usability evaluations that ensure compliance with the FDA’s Human Factors Guidance.
Sheba has over 10 years experience in healthcare and life sciences, including work at the National Institutes of Health, Boston Children’s, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, and the Broad Institute, where she guided physicians and researchers in prototyping digital health technologies. She also leads user research and product development for Jamii Life, an elder care start-up backed by Harvard, MIT, and Oxford.
Sheba is a graduate of Harvard University, where she studied anthropology and life sciences, and where she was awarded the Hoopes Prize for ethnographic research on community health in South Africa.
Awards
Skoll Venture Award, 2020 Yale CBIT Healthcare Hackathon Award, 2019
Harvard Hoopes Prize: Most Outstanding Senior Thesis, 2014
Weatherhead Center Associate Award, 2012
