Project Breathe: A Service Blueprint and Scenario Validation

A Service Blueprint: First Iteration

In order to start to understand how gym class, games, “healers” and data might work together to create a service to support children with asthma, exercise, and empathy in a school setting, we set out to map our proposed service.

While making the service blueprint, we identified areas that might leave children feeling unsure of themselves, confused, or without enough direction. We constructed the blueprint from the perspective of the healers during the week because that seemed to be the most comprehensive way to view the service. We also embedded our customer journey map within the blueprint. Most of our ideas about emotions are assumptions based on our own experiences as children, so we will need to test our hypotheses through prototyping the service.

But what about the data?

Something the team has really been struggling with is how to incorporate data into the service in a meaningful way while also engaging children in a way that is valuable, encourages empathy, and encourages exercise.

Data Concept 1:

While sticking with student healers, a gym tag game, and an arts and crafts “record book” as the primary touch points for the service, we first proposed that a good way to generate and use trigger data was through a health report card that could be sent our separately from the nurse or gym teacher. We felt that encouraging communication between the school nurse and the parents would help facilitate understanding about triggers and self management in the school.

What works:

• Collecting data about asthma incidents through the nurse uses the reporting already done by the nurse as part of the service.
• Creating correlations with external trigger (weather, pollen, air quality) data would allow the school to see if more asthma training was necessary at the school as well as foster understanding about where kids need the most support.
• It would facilitate communication between parents and the school.

What doesn’t:

• The data usage feels a bit like a non-sequitor compared to the rest of the service.
• The nurse already has really good, positive communication with parents and the current system is not a burden.

We needed to come up with a data solution that felt well-integrated and supported students with asthma, while also engaging the rest of the student body in the problem. We decided to re-visit the data question while validating story boards with Laura.

A Shared Book Touchpoint

We sat with our service blue print for the week, this time considering possible touch points to orient, onboard, and engage with the children. After another brainstorming session, we decided that a binder-style book with stickers, cute characters, and evil “triggers” would facilitate education throughout the year. It would prime students with comics about situations to learn to help other children through asthma attacks as well as facilitate creativity through drawing.

Story Boards

With these ideas in mind, we created four experience story-boards to validate with Laura Hunt, the PE teacher at the Falk School.

Concept Validation + New Insights

Overall our concept was well received by the PE teacher. She mentioned that allowing children to be “healers” for the week would work well with already-established norms of job assignment in the kindergarten classroom.

“I like the idea of them taking care of each other.”

She liked the idea of the children looking out for each other, and mentioned that they would take the responsibility seriously. She also validated our game concept, while mentioning that cute characters would be quite well-received.

An aha Moment: An App + Data that Works

While speaking with Laura, she mentioned:

“Teachers are not well-trained in asthma care. You don’t know it until you’ve lived it.”

“Kids get really wiggly and distracted during the day. Teachers often need a way to send them outside to burn off some energy.”

As we thought about these two new insights, we realized that a solution to this newly discovered pain point — that teachers are not trained about asthma AND they need a way to get kids to run around — led us to decide to create a teacher and teacher’s aid facing app that suggests asthma-oriented tag games for kids based on weather and air quality data. The app ideally would provide just-in-time reminders to the teacher to bring inhalers with them outside as well as educate teachers about asthma triggers through explaining the rules of the tag games to the children.

Next Steps

1. Prototype Service Touchpoints at Kindergarten: Game, drawing component, app validation, and book
2. Edit Service Blueprint
3. Edit Value Flow Diagram
4. Begin Iteration