Design Research — Week2

Yvette Huang
Ideation & Prototyping
3 min readNov 24, 2021

Topic: LGBTQ + Healthcare

In this section, we are going to work on the research with NYU Langone Health. This research is about improving patient experience for transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer.

Week1 Research

For this week

After researching related information on week 1, my groupmates and I shared and organized our results to find the pain point for this topic. We also did surveys for non-binary gender patients and interviews for a therapist and clinicians.

Surveys

In the survey, we realized that patients care about 3 points which they felt uncomfortable in their past medical experiences: Bias & Discrimination, sigma, and Gender Affirmation.

  • Bias & Discrimination: They are worried about healthcare providers’ bias and non-acknowledgment of nonbinary gender may impact the quality of care they received.
  • Stigma: Also, they are afraid of getting hurt after disclosing their gender identities and sexual orientations.
  • Gender Affirmation: Pre-assumption of pronouns and sexual orientation by their birth genders. Most of them have similar experiences being called in incorrect pronouns.

Interviews

  • Therapist: Limited social life and trust issues lead to a strong reliance on online community, and unreliable resources of information caused mal-use of medical treatment.
  • Clinicians may be behind on gender training, and miss important diagnostic procedures due to confusion between gender and sex birth

Field Trip to NYU Langone

We also called NYU Langone to see if we could visit the clinic in person to observe the procedure and environment. Unfortunately, we got rejected and the earliest date of an appointment is 2 weeks after. It would be great to access information on the relationship between our client and patients to get more insight into this project.

About Our Idea

How might we create a neutral meeting point between patient and provider, while building a sense of community within the hospital network?

Here are the three components:

  • Complaint System
  • Speaker Series
  • Branding

Complaint System

Sketches of Sarah: Digital User Journey
Sketches of Sarah: Analog User Journey

Speaker Series

  • Occurs every 2 months (6 events per year)
  • 3 practitioner facing events + 3 patient-facing events
  • Uses NYU faculty & community members as a resource
  • Free & Open to the public (must register through Eventbrite)
  • Optional: accepts donations to mutual aid fund for trans & nonbinary medical care

The Deliverables for Next Week

Work Distribution Chart made by Mingjing

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