How field research helped us to create a meaningful iOS app for hospital nurses

A human-centered design case study on how field research and observations completely changed our project.

First, let me introduce you who we are:
We are the weirdOS team, a group of students from the Apple Developer Academy in Naples (Italy). We started working together during a MiniChallenge in February 2020 and that’s how our project was born.

Now let’s start by giving you more information about the project:

• The goal was to create something that could solve a read human need
  HOW? Using Human-Centered Design.

The key of this approach is empathy: you have to deeply understand your user, his gains, his pains, his needs.

• The Persona we decided to focus on was a Nurse. Why? My mom is a nurse, and also all the members of the team have contacts with nurses: this is important because having real and physical contact with your potential user is crucial and has to be easy.

Let’s talk about the research process:

First step: interviews.

We interviewed many nurses in order to know more about their daily tasks.
We conducted 10 interviews and we started to understand more about their work day.
Here an example of the kind of questions we asked:
• What are your main activities at your work, jobs to be done?
• What do you like most in your job? What do you like the least?

As you can see, these questions are all about “WHAT”. But actually, what we really needed to know, it was HOW and WHY. That’s why, even if we collected a lot of information, we still didn’t find something we could really work on; we were stuck because we were still on the surface.

Second step: field research.

This is what really brought us the turning point in the project.

We spent a day in the hospital, observing nurses carrying out their tasks. We could finally share their point of view, and this, trust me, changed everything.

• First because after the first few hours there we could already throw away some previous assumptions and ideas: we clearly saw why some solutions we were thinking about would never fit our User Persona.
• Second because when you ask someone to tell you about his daily tasks, it might be that he doesn’t tell you things that he takes for granted but that are still relevant to your research, that’s why you need to see with your eyes.

But what happened during our “visit” into the hospital?

While observing the work in the Oncology department of the hospital, a nurse in particular captured our attention: the head-nurse.

That’s how we met Alfredo, here he is while working:

Alfredo is the heart of his department:

• He mediates the communication between doctors and nurses, doctors and patients, doctors and patients’ families, patients and nurses
• He gives and receives information to and from the administration of the hospital
• He organizes shifts
• He takes care of the pharmacy of the department
• And, most importantly, he has to constantly insert data about all these things and keep these information always in mind.

All this things at the same time! It’s crazy, isn’t it?

Alfredo’s desk. It was very useful for us to see how he organizes all the data he has to manage.

Moreover, while we were there something unexpected happened:

A doctor came to the head-nurse and was really angry and screamed at him: the doctor was in the surgery room going to operate on a complicated patient but then he realized that they forgot to give the patient an anesthesiological consultation so he couldn’t proceed with the surgery. And as you know, time is crucial in this kind of things.

Let me explain to you how it works: before a surgery every patient has to perform some pre-operation protocols (including the anesthesiological consultation). These protocols are almost always the same for any kind of surgery; the head nurse doesn’t have the responsibility to perform them but he absolutely has the responsibility to check and to ensure, on time, that the protocols have been performed.

And that’s how we came up with our solution:

Well, you can clearly see how much the time spent in the real world helped us:

• We found a new more specific User Persona, not just a nurse, but an head-nurse.
• We found out what we could NOT do: there are some things that you can’t replace with your eventual product.
• WE FOUND A REAL SPECIFIC PROBLEM TO WORK ON.

Third step: prototyping.

Well, even if you finally found your solution you don’t have to forget about your Persona. We prototyped by collaborating with our User Persona, asking him feedback and making changes based on these.

Our main goal it was to make the user experience as comfortable and quick as possible: we don’t want to steal precious time from our user.

Here there is the evolution of our prototype:

Now, the point of this story is:

If we didn’t go to the hospital we would never have stumbled upon this need and probably we would have created something useless based on our assumptions.
If you really want to create something meaningful for you user, nothing is better than going out into the real world and observe with your eyes.

And here we are:

Giovanni, Antonio, Francesco, Ekaterina, Eleonora and Claudia :)

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed!

Antonio Mennillo, Claudia Catapano, Ekaterina Akchurina, Arena Francesco.