MURU

EMS Protocol App

Overview

Paramedics know how difficult it can be to find the right information for life-saving care. MURU was designed for military and civilian EMTs.

My design team and I worked with MURU's in-house engineers to design and ship the Beta app in 6 months.

Role

Lead Product Designer

Services

Strategy
Responsive Web Design
App Design (iOS & Android)
Art Direction (Illustrations)

Duration

6 months for Beta, 2 years total

What is MURU?

MURU is your 'Medical Guru' and the first digitization of medical protocol sets.

MURU was founded by Steven Blocker. Steven is a paramedic who was sick of the problems in the industry, so he decided to build a solution. He hired our team as well as a diverse group of paramedics and engineers who were driven to help solve this problem.

The Problem

We live in a modern world, why aren’t these Protocols digital yet?

EMS Protocols are typically printed out and stored in a 3-ring binder in the back of the ambulances. These documents are complicated, often containing multiple considerations for each type of emergency situation. Additionally, it is hard to keep track of any changes or updates that are sent out from the agency.

No one had spent the time building the infrastructure, database, and admin tools necessary to view, edit and push updates.

Research & Discovery

Our team had a SME (Subject Matter Expert) kick off this project with a thesis around entrepreneurs and cute aggression. Project Monsters Inc. A Squishable Thesis

We used this as a starting point for our brand direction.

Interviews and data

We then spent time speaking with customers, looking at success metrics and started to measure key KPIs to us to target with our MVP.

Qualitative: Interviews with existing customers who formed a business in the past two months to learn more about what struggles they had as a new business owner.

Quantitative: We looked at the financial data of our customers, which indicated that 45% of our customers had no revenue 9 months post-formation.

Design Sprint

A focus on mental health

One of our key takeaways was that running a business is HARD. Many entrepreneurs felt overwhelmed and uneducated.

Mental health is a big topic for business owners. It can be isolating, scary, and overwhelming to keep track of everything you should and need to do in order to succeed. We felt like our lessons could not only address the tactical needs of a business owner but their emotions as well.

Architecture

Lesson framework

I wanted to create a model that would reinforce learning and give users a personalized takeaway that they could immediately apply to their business.

The framework consisted of a 4-step learning model:

  1. Example: An animation that showed them an example of the topic

  2. Learn: Written articles to elaborate on the topic and provide context

  3. Reinforce: An exercise to immediately reflect on the topic as it relates to them

  4. Apply: And finally a customized summary to apply those learnings to their business

Sara Stewart 2025

MURU