Ironhack Project 1: Public Hospital Case Study
Project Brief
With Ironhack officially kicking off this week, we started learning immediately as well as got our groups for the first week’s project. My group consisted of Cristian Rodriguez, Cindy Luo, and myself and our goal was to figure out a way to make dealing with public hospitals an easier, simplified process. Our users consist of people who are looking to find and schedule an appointment with a doctor in a timely manner without having to deal with automated messages, and our intended outcome is for users to be able to find and schedule an appointment in just a few taps.
Problem Statement
As a group, we worked together to decide on the user needs, the business needs, and the goals of the product. We came up with these three statements:
User Needs: We have observed that the service/product is not meeting Mike’s goal of finding and booking a doctor appointment in a reasonable amount of time which is causing a loss of potential clients to our business.
Business Needs: Our service/product was designed to achieve the goal of quickly finding and scheduling an appointment with a well established, reliable doctor for reoccurring users and newcomers alike.
Goals: How might we improve our service/product so that our customers are more successful based on the time spent searching and booking an appointment, as well as increasing the satisfaction rate of our users.
After figuring out our problem statement, we created our hypothesis statement which is: We believe that empowering users with the flexibility to find and schedule an appointment with a well-known doctor in a timely manner will achieve an established relationship between the user and the doctor, as well as encourage users to continue using our service/product in the future. We will know we are correct by collecting and analyzing data that proves users are spending less time on average to set up their appointments, maintaining a high user retention rate, and also by obtaining positive user feedback.
Users & Audience
Now, you may be wondering, who is this Mike guy that has been mentioned? It’s time to dive a bit more into him and discuss where he came from. Throughout the research phase of our project, we were able to gather a lot of valuable information from both surveys and interviews. This information was then able to be used to create a primary persona to serve as our target audience. And thus, may I present you with Mike Smith! Having a primary persona allows us to focus on his main pain points and frustrations which translated into us identifying and solving his problem.
Scope & Constraints
One thing that took everyone by surprise was the amount of work that was going to be done in this first week of the bootcamp. With only five days to have the prototype and presentation, time was definitely of the essence each day, so we really had to push ourselves. With many ideas being expressed by each group member, we had to take a step back at times and really narrow down and figure out what our main focus was and stick to it.
The Process
Regarding the process, we performed user research which included gathering valuable information from surveys and interviews, worked together to create an affinity map along with How Might We statements which allowed us to make an empathy map. From here, we created our user persona, Mike, his user story, and user journey. Once we had these key pieces, we worked together to form our problem statements and hypothesis statement. With these in mind, we each came up with our own mockup designs as a way to ideate and bounce ideas off of each other. This resulted in us taking the best ideas and flows from each member’s mockup to create plan out and create our prototype. Being short on time at this final stage, I focused on creating our prototype while Cristian and Cindy worked on our presentation.
Please check out the link to our prototype here — I’d love to hear what you think in the comments!
Outcomes & Lessons
I’m really proud of what we were able to achieve in just a week, let alone the first time some of us have gone through the design process. While this may be the end for this particular project, I’d like to quickly go over some things that I would’ve liked to do if we were to move on with the next steps.
- Usability Testing — getting our product in the hands of users will give us a better understanding of how they use it, what they may like or dislike about it, and if they are able to achieve the goal of the prototype.
- Iterate based on user feedback.
- Test cycle again to verify that any changes made are working as intended.
- Once we are happy with our user feedback, we can move on to add new features and then go through the cycle again.
Here are a couple of key takeaways from this past week
- Don’t assume that people see things the same way you do; everyone has a different perspective which is why gathering feedback and information from users is so crucial to the process. This allows us to really understand our users.
- Be open-minded and don’t be afraid to try new things even if you don’t quite succeed at first. Learning from failure will allow you to grow as both a designer and, more importantly, as a person.
- It’s important to remember the main goal you’re looking to achieve. Don’t get caught up with extra details or features that may be considered as “nice to have”, but rather narrow down on the main pain points and work to solve those.
Overall, I think the first week of Ironhack was great — we learned a ton of material and applied it daily to create an awesome presentation and prototype. I look forward to learning more, improving as a designer, and solving more problems in next week’s project!
