Research for Design -Final Reflection
I cannot believe the semester is over! Very sad to say goodbye to this Ideation & Prototyping class as I learned a lot every week throughout the semester.
This week, we gave the final presentation of our product to our sponsor, NYU Langone Health. We divided our presentation into four sections, Intro, Research, Our prototypes, and Conclusion. We talked about how this design presentation should be in a form of storytelling, to make sure the audience was able to understand our process and the reasoning behind why we designed the final product, so Ruobing started the presentation with a story of Chloe. Chloe had bad experiences as a transgender patient at hospitals and now the trauma prevents her from receiving any kind of medical care. Then, Ruobing explained our generative research and the problem statement as an introduction.
In the second part, I talked about the user research sessions we conducted. It was an essential part because we made every design decision based on that user research session, and we wanted to ensure that the audience understands that. I explained our group's in-depth interview session and its method, how it went, and the findings along with the quotes we got from the participants. The most challenging part was to sort all the valuable quotes our participants said during the interview and summarize the findings. (I wish I could read all the quotes if I had time!) I categorized the findings into three parts and summarized pain points and how we can solve them through revamping the NYU Transgender Health website.
Then, Blessing talked about our final prototypes, tieing all the design decisions back to the research findings we got, and Yixun summarized everything by explaining the current problems and how our design could possibly solve them. We ended the presentation with ideas for the next iteration. Thankfully, we got good comments and feedbacks from the sponsor on our presentation style, and how realistic and easy to implement our designs are. Based on the feedback, it seemed that we were able to convey the problem, our design decisions, and the reasoning behind them well. Overall, I am really proud of all the work my team was able to do in a limited amount of time.
Link to the presentation slides
Reflection
One of the first things we did as a group was to share our background, what we want to get out of this project, and most importantly, our values in teamwork. This allowed us to commit to this project, care about other each other, which led to great teamwork throughout the project. Each brought in our own strength, and I was able to learn a lot from other teammates by seeing their skills, working together on prototypes, conducting interview sessions together, project planning, and discussions. Also, it was my first time doing a design project on something I was completely unfamiliar with, but I learned a lot about the disparities and discrimination trans and non-binary folks have to face in health care, the fear and trauma, and how there is still a long way to go to make medical care inclusive and accessible to everyone. Overall, I am really proud of how our end product and presentation came together, how great of a team we were, and I’m hoping to see what NYU Langone can do in the future to be more inclusive to make everyone feel safe and comfortable to seek medical care.
This class taught me ideation and prototyping theories as well as opportunities every week to put the theories into practice by making things. I was able to try new tools, explore new ideas, learn about design beyond the digital interface, teamwork, presentation skill, design research, and many more. Thanks to Professor Kathleen, guest speakers, and classmates, I realized my interest in service design and systems design, beyond digital touchpoints. I am very grateful for an engaging, supportive, and resourceful professor.
Thank you!
