Rebuilding a Medical Analytics Platform at GSK

Medical Insights Analysts were opening AIM, clicking a filter, and going to make coffee while the dashboard loaded. Thirty-plus minutes, on a good day. Most of them had stopped opening it at all. AIM was GSK’s global platform for surfacing trends across trial and field data; in practice, the Power BI implementation was so slow and rigid that the tool was being bypassed. I was the lead and only UX voice on the project. The redesign got demoted to the second priority. The platform itself was the UX problem, and the fight to prove it would take eight months before a rebuild could begin.

What I changed

Diagnosing the real constraint

Initial testing produced a SUS score of 34. Iterations within Power BI improved that only to 51, making it clear that this was not a polish problem. The technology itself was limiting performance, flexibility, and the kinds of visualizations analysts needed for real exploratory work.

Advocating for a full rebuild

Working with the Product Owner, I spent eight to nine months pushing for a rebuild using a custom stack centered on Plotly. The redesign focused on faster performance, workflows grounded in actual analyst behavior, and medical visualizations tailored to insight discovery.

AIM dashboard main view — Plotly-based medical analytics visualizations on a laptop. — The rebuilt AIM dashboard. Plotly-based visualizations replaced Power BI; load times dropped from 30+ minutes to seconds; exploratory analysis became possible across years of previously underused field data.

AIM dashboard trend view — exploratory visualization across long-dormant datasets. — The rebuilt AIM dashboard. Plotly-based visualizations replaced Power BI; load times dropped from 30+ minutes to seconds; exploratory analysis became possible across years of previously underused field data.

Rebuilding trust while rebuilding the product

Because analyst confidence had eroded, I also created a weekly “You Said, We Listened” feedback loop and used live demos during focus groups to show how user input was shaping the product in real time.

Results and impact

System Usability Scale across the arc: initial Power BI build, iteration within Power BI, full Plotly rebuild.

Improved SUS from 34 to 81 across the redesign
Reduced load times from 30+ minutes to seconds
Increased insight generation speed by roughly 3x
Reached 85% adoption after redesign
Rebuilt analyst trust through transparent feedback loops
Received GSK’s Gold Award in May 2021, the company’s highest internal recognition

Reflection

This project was one of the clearest product wins of my career and one of the worst organizational experiences of my life.

The product improved dramatically, but the effort required to get there was unsustainable. I was operating in a low-maturity environment with weak trust, poor collaboration, and constant pressure to prove what should already have been obvious. That experience became a turning point for me: it showed me that strong product outcomes depend not just on design quality, but on whether the organization creates the conditions for design to succeed.

GSK is where I started moving toward Design Operations.