End but not the end — final reflection
During the last class of the course, our group finally presented our solution to the entire class and the NYU Langone sponsors, which is exciting and encouraging at the same time.
As a group, we rehearsal for several times before the real presentation on and offline. During the last week of the presentation, we divided the presentation slides into four sections and have someone assigned to work on the structure and context, as well as the scripts, and then came back as a group to practice and give each other advice. The first time we practiced in class, we were WAY over time, which made us a bit anxious that — yes, we have a lot of design stories to share, but we have to “kill” some and try to show the most meaningful pieces of the entire process. We sat down together and focus more on listening to each other’s presentations that if there is anything repetitive that we do not need to mention or replace with something more meaningful to our design solution. After revising and practicing over and over again, everyone starts to get more comfortable with their parts to present the best of what we want to show.
A critical decision of the presentation
The actual presentation is a big success, and this really made the four of us excited and happy about the decisions on the actual design solution and the flow of the presentation.
Most of the guest lecturers and sponsors really like the hook we had to tie a real trans person’s story with the problem we are trying to target and solve. Being the person who actually covered that part, my original plan was to include one of our personae’s user journey as the story, however, after bringing this up to my team and discussion with the team, we all believed that personae in our case should be explained after we shared the insights and findings from our user interview. As a result, I re-watched the first video that I found during the first week of my research from The Oregonians that they interviewed a group of transgender patients about their bad experiences with medical providers. The first time I watched the video, the stories were foreign and shocking to me that I have never experienced that myself and wasn’t able to resonate with them very well; now, with all the data and knowledge I learned from this project, I started to understand the pain, anxiety, and helplessness that transgender patients experienced with doctors. Of which, I finally decided to share the story of Chloe Floris to bring out the problem of broken trust bond between medical providers and transgender patients with some simple data.
“I once have a therapist who misgendered me to an entire room of people..he never talked to me, never looked at me into my eyes, and never apologize. As a transgender woman myself, I get misgendered nearly on a daily basis, but having that in a medical setting? That’s something I could have opted out of, and I will, for my own mental health.”
It is a short story but strong enough to bring the readers into the situation when a transgender patient deals with doctors. I thought it would be a really interesting way to start the presentation, just like a TED speech.
What I learned
The most important thing I learned from this project is that I started to think about the user group that is unobserved or marginalized by the general public. LGBTQ community is somewhat an unfamiliar concept to me that I personally do not have many connections of that community that as a designer, I do not really understand the pain points and the needs from that group. Working to design solutions for users that we are not familiar with is always a challenge, but at the same time, an opportunity for us designers to learn more and thin more considerably on the accessibility of the solution. While at the same time, as one of the groups mentioned, designers should always think back to the users that if the focus of one group actually brings the neglecting of another group through the iterative processes.
And setting a goal for a solution sometimes is also important, not only the goal of what to achieve or solve, but also the practicality and feasibility that whether this design solution can be actionable right away, or in need of further development and testing. Our team was clear at the beginning that we want this solution to be actionable and easy to adapt to whatever technology NYU Langone has right now, and that is also one of the reasons why we came up with this solution of revamping the website. As we stated during the presentation that those transgender patients not willing to see doctors because of the negative experiences is a macro-level healthcare equity issue rather than an individual health problem, we believe urgent actions need to be taken in order to change the status quo from a micro-level — this is why instead of developing a new application, we chose to revamp instead. Just like one of the sponsors said, “Just moving doctors section up, it is not that much work, people!” We want to show that transgender patients can trust doctors just by providing a user experience that is more inclusive and considerate.
Last but not least, teamwork. I think I am in luck to be able to work with my awesome teammates' Blessing, Erika and Yixun. All of us do have a mutual focus in digital interface design, however, each person does have unique design background that can contribute to the project in different ways. I learn a lot just by working with the team, in UX research, service design or just simply conducting inclusive conversations.
This is a really challenging project with a very vague prompt but a very sensitive user group, and we have to come up with a design within only 4–5 weeks. I am happy that our group finally did a great job and got a lot of great comments from the guests who listened to our presentation, and I will be extremely excited to see if some of those can be carried into real life by NYU Langone (just overall, not specifically transgender health) now or in the future that can help with the marginalized groups feel safe and comfortable again to seek the medical services they deserve with confidence.
“Final” final thoughts on the class
I still remembered I suffered quite a lot at the beginning of the class working on so much handcraft homework — still remembered me sitting on the floor for hours to make my elephant from recycles. Now as I think about the entire class and the behind topics that have been covered, a lot of them are starting to make sense to me now as a design cycle. As a Steinhardt student, I always think process and reflections are important for learning, and applying theories and concepts into practice is something we called as Constructionism that students learn by doing. In a way, this is the other way that we do first and then transfer knowledge to what we just did, however, I do believe by making actual products is the best way to truly understand the theory and concepts of anything, including design. This is a challenging class for me, but I learned a lot in making products, thinking about users, and working with others.
