Let’s talk healthcare design: Nick Hayes
What happens if you put a team of designers in a hospital, give an amazing work space and challenge them to solve some difficult problems?
In Auckland, you get the DHW Lab.
Nick Hayes is Lead UX designer at the lab situated in Auckland City Hospital. We caught up with Nick to hear about how they work, their current projects and some tips for designers starting out in healthcare.
What’s your current role and how did you get there?
I tend to call myself a UX designer but that’s a fairly foreign term in a hospital environment so sometimes it’s easier to introduce myself simply as a ‘designer’.
I’ve taken a fairly unconventional path into UX; I studied architecture for 3 years before deciding it wasn’t for me. Then I took a year off, travelled a bit, and decided I wanted to do postgraduate study in Industrial design. My intention was to make physical objects but I ended up focusing my research and practice in digital products, services and systems. Having worked in that space for a few years now, I feel much more confident that I’ve found my lane as a UX/service designer.
As for healthcare, it’s something I’ve always been passionate and inquisitive about. I think a lot of that stemmed from the countless hours of health-related conversation I’ve had over the years with my mother, who’s a clinical nurse specialist.
What does your workspace look like?
The space we’ve set up inside the hospital is pretty rad. It’s a large open studio, full of temporary space dividers, trestle tables and all the work we’ve done over the last few years.
It’s a pretty unexpected space to enter — a stark contrast from the rest of the hospital environment — but I think that gets staff and clinicians really excited about what we’re doing here.
The most valuable aspect of having a space inside the hospital is the proximity and access to patients and clinicians that you just wouldn’t get if you worked offsite.
The nature of how we’ve set the space up encourages collaboration and prototyping, and is symbolic of the collaborative venture between AUT and Auckland DHB.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
The three main projects I’m working on at the moment stem across web, mobile applications, and service design:
Living well with mild cognitive impairment: I’m working with a group of researchers from the Centre for Person-centred Research, exploring how a web resource can support senior citizens experiencing age-related changes to their memory and thinking.
Medicines education in mental health: The goal of this project is to develop a patient-centred application that promotes positive mental health in young adults living with psychosis. The project seeks to understand barriers or beliefs that influence patients’ adherence to antipsychotic medication, whilst also considering how other factors, such as nutrition, exercise and social support, contribute to positive mental health.
Welcoming experiences: This project utilises a service design approach to define what a welcoming experience looks and feels like for all users at Grafton and Greenlane hospitals. This involves mapping several entry/arrival experiences for research-based personas, and developing a service blueprint with a number of different stakeholder groups.
What are the biggest challenges you’ve found working as a UX designer inside a hospital?
I think “design” is still a relatively new thing in the hospital environment, and we’ve worked hard to increase the organisation’s understanding of the design process since we began.
Projects are often constrained by very slim budgets, or no budget at all, so it’s very challenging producing high quality outcomes with minimal resources.
How does the DHW Lab choose the projects it takes on?
We have an ideas board at the entrance to the Lab, which anyone is welcome to add ideas to. At the start of each week the core team review and discuss newly added ideas to see what’s appropriate to tackle, given our time and resources availability. Our challenge is balancing these types of projects with larger work streams that form the Lab’s core business.
How has your design approach adapted for a healthcare environment?
A hospital environment is full of people from all walks of life, so you need to be very considerate and empathetic of different people’s needs when designing solutions.
You also need to be a strong advocate for designing experiences holistically, because there are often so many facets of a user’s healthcare experience that are overlooked or overshadowed by clinical outcomes. Someone might think it’s “all good cause I got my kidney” but what was their experience like navigating to and around the hospital? How well were they prepared for their surgery? What was the environment like for their whanau waiting anxiously for the results? These are the types of questions we ask when designing better healthcare experiences.
The DHW Lab has a core group of postgraduate students, each with their own research project. How do you support them as a UX designer?
There are some fantastic student projects this year! Everything from graphic, product, spatial and digital design. It can be a quite an overwhelming space to work in as a postgrad student — engaging with clinicians, communicating and demonstrating your process, testing ideas with patients etc — so we’re always around to bounce ideas off and often host design critique sessions with students.
What do you think has been the most impactful project from the DHW Lab so far?
It’s hard to say… We’ve done quite a lot of visionary work around what the hospital campus and environment could look like in 2030, which is a great opportunity to challenge the status quo or ‘business as usual’ through a design lens.
I worked on a project with a group of pharmacists and researchers to make evidence-based antibiotic treatment guidelines available through a smartphone app called Script.
The feedback so far has all been really positive, and it’s opened up a broader opportunity to create an ecosystem or portal of mobile-based clinical guidelines. You can read more about it here.
This year you’be helped run a co-design workshop with a group of senior citizens. How was that?
This was the first workshop I’ve run at the Lab, so it was a new and exciting experience in general. The group of senior citizens we were engaging with have experienced changes to their memory and thinking, often clinically referred to as Mild Cognitive Impairment. It was really powerful listening to their stories and hearing how their experiences affect various aspects of their daily life.
We wanted to explore how we might support their lived experiences through a website, and although only some of them were familiar using computers or the internet, they had an abundance of ideas about what could be included. I think what encouraged this was simplifying the idea of making a website into an activity anyone could do using simple paper prototypes and post-it notes.
In terms of challenges, it’s important to avoid using labels or medical terms that users may not associate themselves with (e.g. mild cognitive impairment), and simplifying any technical terms or explaining them through familiar analog analogies.
What’s the best advice you could give to a designer starting their first healthcare project?
The two pieces of advice I’d give would be on communication and establishing relationships:
Communication: The term ‘design’ often carries an element of mystery in a healthcare environment. The best way to explain what we mean when talking about ‘the design process’ is to show it rather than talk about it; making ideas tangible through visual representation is a very powerful communication tool.
Relationships: A lot of the success we’ve experienced since starting the Lab has been a result of establishing good working relationships with clinicians or stakeholders who support the unique approach we bring to problem solving. Getting influential people within the organisation onboard with your vision and process goes a long way in seeing ideas realised.
And finally, what’s coming up for you that you’re excited about
I’m heading to Melbourne for a holiday (aka food and coffee tour) in October. I’ve never been before but I’m really keen to check out the urban design and architecture. Having lived in New York and visited other large cities like London and Barcelona, I’m really interested in how urban design and planning can influence lifestyle choices and the health and wellbeing of people.
Questions from James Turner and answers by Nick Hayes who’s currently a UX Designer at The DHW Lab in Auckland, New Zealand.
DesigningHealth.care tells stories from designers working on the front lines of healthcare transformation. Want to take part? Drop us an email at hello@jamesturner.co.uk.
