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Process Blog Week 2
This week on our research design project, we focused on refining and defining the information we found during the research phase to narrow the scope of our upcoming design. We amassed a large cache of information from class-provided sources, interview notes, surveys, and more. As a team, we worked together to make sense of this data, classify it and try to uncover the stories it was asking us to tell.
Process:
We started this week by hearing from Andy VandenHuevel, a NJ-based Service Designer. Andy discussed his experience at various companies and how service design can differ depending on the firm, role, and if someone is freelancing vs. consulting. Andy discussed the importance of user journeys, user maps, and personas and how they can be the visual appeal in design that otherwise is a very intangible and invisible process. We then split off into our groups to continue working.
Our group started by laying out all of the relevant data points and information we gained over the course of our research. Some of these points included: “lack of knowledge around treating gender-expansive patients” or “the first interaction in a healthcare clinic is essential to gauging the safety of a space.” We then continued by classifying these points into thematic groups. Our four groups of key insights were organized as interpersonal, institutional, environmental, and marketing.
During class, we wanted to lay out several different aspects of the design and so we looked at a persona and structured a hypothetical story. After doing that we analyzed potential touchpoints, user goals, opportunities, activities, and stages within the scenario to get a better understanding of what possibilities exist along the way. This was helpful in exploring the topic but it did feel overwhelming and felt like the benefit was not proportional to the time invested during class.
Later in the week, we scheduled a meeting. During the meeting, we evaluated the priority of each as well as the ability to create change. We drafted a few sample “how might we” statements to guide our design.
From there we followed a unique process of honing the idea down. As we each provided two potential HMW statements, to make the final three we each had to select one we felt was best from the pool that wasn’t our personal submission. This brought us to three very similar ideas while maintaining the entire team’s contributions. After analyzing the final statements, we decided to go with attempting to change the initial check-in experience.
Our final “how might we…” became this:
“How might we create a step by step toolkit for fostering empathy, providing prompts, and improving the initial check-in experience for members of the gender-expansive community?”
Once we had this statement defined we had a much clearer understanding of where to focus our efforts. In order to stay focused we added some notes on desired outcomes from the design and listed some questions that would help us dive deeper into the short window of opportunity that happens during our target timeframe.
The process of asking questions was beneficial because before even designing any prototypes it felt as if they had already begun expanding possibilities by “breaking” the design.
I brought up an example of a toolkit from an organization I did some work with regarding patient empowerment in a healthcare setting called “The Patient Revolution.” These were cards a patient could fill in and share with their doctor about their concerns, health issues, hopes, and fears for the future. The humane core of the design is similar to what we’re looking to achieve with our toolkit but for the gender-expansive community.
Overall I’m very excited about where we are currently with our design process. Our team has been good about communicating, distributing workload, and meeting. The prototyping phase seems filled with opportunities for the coming week.
