athenahealth closes the gap between design and user needs with Marvin MCP

Senior Product Designer Katherine McVey and her team surface user research in Figma Make with Marvin MCP to build context-aware prototypes.

Customer Outcomes

• Pulling insights from interviews into Figma is condensed into seconds from hours.
• Prototypes match the right KPIs and information architecture on the first pass.
• Real user insights and context guide design throughout a project.

In her Medium article, The Figma Make & user research handshake, Senior Product Designer Katherine McVey explores how athenahealth has transformed user validation in UX design with Marvin MCP. Katherine and her team build athenaConnect, the interoperability layer that connects clinical, financial, and patient engagement solutions to the broader healthcare ecosystem for thousands of providers and patients.

She connected Figma Make to Marvin, where all of her team's research lives, so she no longer has to leave Figma to find relevant user feedback and insights. She can ask for it right where she's already building. 

Designers can access insights on the canvas

Like most UX design teams, they would interview users, rewatch the recordings, and tag the transcripts in Marvin. Then they'd bring over those insights into Figma to shape the product design. Collating insights into actionable next steps would take hours.

Today, with Marvin MCP, the team can ask questions to surface relevant research directly in Figma Make. Now, they get exactly what they need in seconds. 

“Instead of analyzing the research in HeyMarvin and mining quotes to derive UX insights from, I can ask directly in Figma Make, the place where I’m building a working prototype of my design.”

User validation is easier with context-aware design

Without Marvin MCP, early drafts of AI-generated designs would land close, but leave out key user requests. Now, Figma Make can add exact details requested by users in interviews to prototypes. For example, here’s a prompt she used to create a dashboard:

“@Marvin reference [meeting title] with internal stakeholders and build a dashboard that would show them all the data they mentioned wanting to see for our newly released tool.”

With a direct line to user research through Marvin MCP, Figma Make's output changed in three instrumental ways:

• The right KPIs, identified sooner: Designs reflect exact user requests, verified from real data in Marvin.
• User requests are prioritized correctly: Figma Make references the hierarchy of needs users expressed.
• Designs require less polishing: First drafts hit the mark sooner, so the team spends less time making the design great.

Research continuously informs UX design 

With Marvin MCP, Katherine has seen her designs shift from simply being data-driven to context-informed. With continuous access, user insights influence design decisions at each stage of the project. They’re no longer forgotten as the design evolves.

“By using MCP connectors, we are no longer designing in a vacuum. We are designing with the context of our user research right inside our Figma files. This makes the design process less linear because user insight stays present deeper into the evolution of a project.”

The design process becomes less linear, less siloed, and more grounded in what users really say.

Want to see how Marvin connects to the tools your team already uses? Book a demo today.