A few years ago, I made the transition from Visual Design to User Experience Design. I knew that as much as I have enjoyed creating beautiful and aesthetic layouts and screens it just wasn’t enough for me. I’ve always wanted to be involved in more meaningful and impactful work and make a difference in people’s lives which is why I fell in love with UX design. The fact that I could reach out to people and understand their pain points and desires and then use those insights to guide me in reimagining and improving their experience with a product or service exhilarates me. In my current role at Fusion, I am able to take that further up a notch. In a recent one-on-one with my manager, he introduced the term ‘holistic designer’ to describe the way we design experiences for our customers.
We help solve “wicked problems” in healthcare by understanding and visualizing the larger dynamics of the system while staying grounded in the needs of the people. The term “wicked problem” was first coined by Horst Rittel, design theorist and professor of design methodology at the Ulm School of Design, Germany. These are problems with many interdependent factors that are often either incomplete, in flux or difficult to define therefore requiring a deep understanding of the stakeholders involved, and an innovative approach provided by design thinking.
With a holistic mindset you are able to uncover the root of the problem and not just treat the symptom. By looking at the entire set of interacting components versus examining the isolated aspects of a user’s experience you can predict the series of micro-moments that users might have across all touchpoints during their experience with a product or service. It requires you to frequently zoom-out to fly high above the user’s world and examine all angles of the user’s experience and then zoom back in to focus on their individual needs.
According to Miklos Philips, Principal UX Designer at Toptal,
Holistic design takes into account the person, the device, the moment, the ethnographic environment, the physical space as well as human behavior and psychology, i.e thinking, attitudes, emotions, motivations, abilities, triggers etc. and aims to deliver an optimal experience. At the times the entire experience (with a product or brand) is not limited to digital devices but it’s a mix of digital, real-world brick-and-mortar, and human-to-human interactions.
The experience that Philips talks about here is highly relatable to a patient’s experience with their healthcare. For example, a customer for United Health Group would not just be limited to a single experience (app, store) but would have an omni-channel experience with multiple touchpoints at various channels of interaction (app, online store, in-clinic visits, virtual visits, payments, prescriptions, etc.) throughout their healthcare journey. It is an intricate and complex journey and if built well should be a seamless and navigable experience for the customer. Providing that optimal experience is key to building lasting loyalty with customers. To be able to create that delightful experience a holistic designer would have to zoom out at multiple levels to understand these interacting channels in the bigger picture and zoom into the depths of human psychology to understand behaviors, attitudes, and motivations.
Apple comes quite close to following the holistic design approach by maintaining a consistency in their devices to store experience. All Apple products sync naturally, use the same software and interface, and look/feel the same. We strive towards creating that unity of experience in healthcare. However, healthcare is much more complex than Apple’s business model-though they are trying to dabble into the healthcare model-and we have to change norms in order to unify all under a single umbrella. Talk about a “wicked problem”!
We tackle these healthcare challenges by following the design thinking methodology- a holistic design approach. It is especially beneficial in the early, often ambiguous stages of product development.
The initial discovery phase is crucial to develop an understanding of the users, the opportunities, and problems to solve for and establishing a shared vision for successful outcomes. This phase includes conducting exploratory research such as user interviews, diary studies and gathering quantitative insights for data triangulation to understand the users. In addition, stake holder interviews help understand the existing processes in place and the business objectives we are working towards.
The discovery helps to finalize the problem statement and informs the creation of artifacts such as user personas (or a persona ecosystem), journey maps, and/or service blueprints. These artifacts assist with following a human-centered design approach during our diverse and collaborative ideation and co-creation workshops. To ensure that we are solving problems in an inclusive and holistic manner during these sessions we aim to include participants from the entire ecosystem of the user’s experience.
The design thinking approach helps uncover new and varied solutions that are sifted through prioritization frameworks based on impact, effort, feasibility, desirability, and viability depending on the context. This helps the design team develop an early proof of concept or low to mid fidelity prototype of the solutions that were prioritized and run a series of early concept/solution testing with the end users and stakeholders. This process of early testing and refining helps bring user validated products and solutions to market faster.
The non-linear process of design thinking combined with systems thinking helps solve complex challenges by visualizing the larger dynamics of the system while staying grounded in the needs of the people. Systems thinking offers a necessary antidote to some of design thinking’s blind spots by taking a holistic view of complex social challenges — rather than just building new solutions that address symptoms of a problem, but not root causes.
In a nutshell holistic design requires that you slow down to accelerate. It empowers you with the ability to solve “wicked problems” for massive and long-term impact.
A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.
