Medical devices and healthcare applications often fail not because of bad engineering but because they misunderstand how people actually work. Areteworks Product Design, Inc. has spent more than 25 years addressing that gap. The Los Angeles-based firm specializes in UX/UI design and human factors for medical devices, healthcare applications and scientific instruments.
The company helps clients understand clinical workflows and turn those insights into intuitive products. Its services include user research, clinical workflow design, prototyping and usability testing, with documentation to support development and FDA submissions when needed. Areteworks has worked with companies such as Edwards Lifesciences, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Alcon, Johnson and Johnson, COBE Medical, Dermspectra, WaveTec Vision, Aneuvo and Enigma Diagnostics.
Steven Liu, co-founder of Areteworks, brings more than 30 years of healthcare design experience, including work on Class II and Class III medical devices. He began his healthcare design career in 1992 at Hauser Design, then one of the top three medical product design firms in the U.S. He later worked with several startups before co-founding Areteworks in 2002.
“I’ve always wanted my work to help people. At Areteworks, that begins with listening closely and understanding what people need, including the things they don’t put into words. We turn that understanding into medical devices and healthcare applications that feel intuitive and help people work with greater confidence.”
That approach stems from spending decades in surgical suites, ICUs, cath labs and laboratories. Liu says the firm listens for needs both spoken and unspoken, paying attention to hesitation, uncertainty and workarounds that reveal where a design could better support its users. Research, workflow mapping and prototyping can sound time-consuming and expensive, but Areteworks tailors the work to a product’s stage of development and budget. The firm says it knows where to look, which questions to ask and when deeper investigation is needed.
One project Liu cites with particular pride is Medrad’s Mark 7 Arterion, for which Areteworks designed the touchscreen user experience. In a Bayer survey of 125 customers across four countries, 97% said they would recommend the system and 92% saw an advantage over their previous injector. “Contributing to a product that earned that level of customer confidence is a meaningful achievement,” Liu said.
The company’s portfolio also includes contributions to Edwards Lifesciences’ HemoSphere and Thermo Fisher Scientific’s NanoDrop One and OMNIC Paradigm. These projects reflect the breadth of Areteworks’ work, from helping clinicians understand critical patient information to making complex laboratory workflows more intuitive.
As part of its process, Areteworks uses what it calls Anxiety Maps to document where confidence breaks down during product use and translate those findings into practical design decisions. The firm then turns insights into intuitive workflows, predictable product behavior and working prototypes tested with intended users.
Clients work directly with Liu from research through design, alongside their product, engineering and human factors teams. That continuity keeps the understanding gained through research connected to the final design, with documentation to support development and FDA submissions when needed.
Areteworks specializes in healthcare UX and human factors design for medical devices and scientific instruments. The firm’s early milestones include Liu’s work being published in Forbes ASAP’s “Simplicity” in 1999 and Smart Computing’s “Computing Anytime, Anywhere” in 2000.
Liu’s path into healthcare design was not immediate. With a background in human factors, he began consulting for medical companies before co-founding Areteworks. Over the years, he says the people he has met in clinical and laboratory settings have shaped how he thinks about design. “Listening to their concerns and understanding their hesitations and workarounds helps us recognize their needs, both spoken and unspoken,” he said.
At Areteworks, that understanding is brought into the design of medical devices, healthcare applications and scientific instruments. The goal, Liu says, is to create intuitive workflows and products that fit the way people actually work. For him, the most meaningful part is helping people feel more confident with the tools they depend on, whether they are caring for a patient, making a discovery or managing their own health.