The story
Our product was a 120-page medical report. The first one took 2 weeks to create manually. One month with the errors.
Until last year (2024) at Deep Holistics, our primary product was a 120-page book. This book contained report of medical data and action plan for the customer.
The first one we made took us more than 2 weeks to populate manually, and even after that with errors and changes and all the back and forth it took a month.
Engineering said it couldn't be automated (in time), so I found a Figma plugin workaround
Since the report had too many changing components with every user, and the design was too complicated for them to replicate in time, the tech team didn't show any confidence in automating this any time soon.
They were estimating months to come up with a solution. It was not feasible. We needed something to get going. If I had to enter another person's data in that Figma file, one my one, I would lose my shit.
So I started looking for a workaround. Tried out a couple things and I landed on a reliable enough Figma plugin. It was a semi-automatic solution, but at that point all I wanted was to not have to enter 500+ data points manually.
Built a working prototype in 2-3 days and got it approved
I worked out all the kinks and had a working prototype ready in 2–3 days. Pitched it, got it approved, worked with the team to implement it, created all the master sheets needed for it to work.
I'd worked out the complete workflow, data structure, and how we'd handle different cases. I also asked engineering for input on the data format so it would work with their systems.
Reduced report generation from 2 weeks to 15-20 minutes
The compromise was that we'd handle the implementation using the plugin system, while engineering would enhance specific parts when they had bandwidth. We got the manual work down from 2+ weeks to 50-60 minutes for the next few reports. Later on, we got that time down to 10-15 minutes.
And consequently the amount of errors reduced by a lot. There were some things here and there, but now that was problems with the coding logic itself. We find the problem, make the change, and update the entire file in seconds.
This system became the foundation for all our future reports
Even though this is not strictly a designer level task (more like system designer I guess), but that has been the proudest thing I've accomplished here.
What changed? I got way more comfortable with Google Sheets than I ever thought I would. Used a bit of coding knowledge I already had to push things further. And we ended up using this automation system for multiple different types of tests we launched after that. Made it possible to generate various reports in little time that would've been impossible otherwise.