Overcoming challenges to user research in healthcare
I’ve been working in user research at accuRx for almost three years now, and every time I read or hear about user research in other sectors, what always strikes me is how different some of the challenges to good user research are when working in a healthcare context.
I wanted to share four key challenges to doing user research with healthcare professionals, and how we’ve tried to tackle them at accuRx.
- Getting time with healthcare professionals can be hard
Endless lists of patients to see, tasks to do and not nearly enough time in which to do it all… Healthcare staff are working in a super pressurised environment, and often feel very stressed. Spending time with a user researcher is rarely top priority!
2. People are (understandably) really risk averse
People are striving to provide a service that is clinically effective and safe, in a complex system, which is increasingly stretched. This in combination with the fact that a culture of blame still exists in many parts of the NHS (if things go wrong individuals are targeted, and systemic factors ignored) can make people really reluctant to try new things.
3. Things change at the last minute, all the time
Things can be quite unpredictable when you are at the frontline. Staff shortages, patient issues (twice when I was visiting a practice a patient had a cardiac arrest!), rota changes, appointments running over etc. These things can make planning tricky sometimes!
4. A lot of existing healthcare tech is poorly designed
This means people often expect yours to be too! They can be reluctant to try things out and trust you initially. They can also have unusual mental models from interacting with software that’s not so user friendly.
How we’ve tackled the challenges
Very early user research at accuRx started out by spending time with healthcare staff that friends and family introduced us to. We’ve been fortunate that in building a product users really love (see our feedback wall in Annie’s blog here!) we’ve built a lot of trust and many users are now keen to get involved. Some other things that help are…
- Knowing the language and context well
Healthcare is full of jargon and complexity which staff often don’t have time to go into detail on. Having a good base understanding can speed things up a lot. People are also more trusting and comfortable if you can show you understand the context they work in. We’re lucky in accuRx that we’ve got clinicians and people with lots of healthcare experience on the team. New joiners get a copy of The Appointment by Graham Easton (a good starting point if you don’t know much about general practice), and we get everyone out to visit practices once a quarter to help build this context!
2. Being flexible and scrappy
Testing/interviews
Always schedule with decent notice (often clinicians need more than a week) and keep sessions short. Be flexible with your questions, and prioritise what you need to learn in case the user has to leave early. Do it remotely or travel to people if they are nearby. Mondays are often good to avoid too! Also, be prepared to be hacky with your tech (for recent testing sessions we used Zoom for screen sharing, but lots of GP practice PCs don’t have a mic, so we had to use phone for audio).
Shadowing and onsite user research
Go for at least half a day — you may have to hang round, but it’s often a great chance to catch different people opportunistically, test lots of different things and at least if someone drops out you might catch someone else.
Community space
We’ve built up a Facebook community of users where can we post polls, ideas and designs. Although not super robust, it’s great for getting a quick feel for what our users are thinking. It’s also a great place to ask people to get involved in user research.
3. Being empathetic and understanding
This is really important in building good relationships with users. If someone is having a bad day, you can be sure it’s probably a lot worse than most of your bad days at work. Let people know it’s okay if they have to jump out of things. If things are hectic and you’re onsite make sure to take a step back. If you can tell a user is stressed, don’t persist and suggest rescheduling. Making cups of tea and bringing cake is usually appreciated!
More blogs on user research at accuRx coming shortly… keep an eye out!
