Week 2: narrow down the scope

As we enter the third week of the group project, things start to get more interesting and intense. The first week kicks us off with intense research of transgender patients and the barriers they face when seeking medical services, which members of our team, is something that we all haven’t had a chance to learn in-depth about before being introduced by the sponsors at NYU Langone.

For the first week, our group didn’t have a mid-point check-up meeting before the class on Tuesday. Instead of that, we each created a simple slide deck and showcases what we each found out based on our research and what are some possible touchpoints that we can get into in-depth research in order to come up with solutions. Meanwhile, we also created this resource center mural board to collectively share the resources that we think are important and interesting for this project. We divide the resources into five categories: data, news, reports/academic studies, interviews/real experiences, and others. All of us dropped some interesting findings there, which are intended for the final presentation, as well as our problem statement and analysis.

The problem statement

Even though we didn’t have an extra meeting before the class, four of us all come up with very similar findings of the pain points that transgender patients are facing at the moment; and the initial ideas for solving the problems are also somewhat similar but in different modalities. All of us reached to an agreement that transgender patients are extremely anxious about going to the clinic because of the bad experiences they had before being discriminated against, misgendered, assumed, and generalized. Our problem statement about this project is really about rebuilding confidence for transgender patients that they feel comfortable enough to seek medical help whenever it’s needed.

Here is the HMW statement our team came up with after our discussions:

HOW MIGHT WE… present additional information about transgender health that allows providers to be more open, personable, trustworthy to the patients [SO THAT…] the patients feel comfortable and confident to seek medical services with respect and without fear of abuse/discrimination.

The goals

“Trust” is a word that all of us agree that we have to rebuild for transgender patients in order to provide them the services that they deserve, as well as the friendly and inclusive medical experiences. In short, our goals are:

Building more trust among providers and patients through:

• providing inclusive and successive information and resources about transgender health (including the medical care team) to the patients and their families
• Train the medical care team with intensive transgender health terminologies, communication strategies, and issues trans patients are facing right now

Creating supportive community around trans/nonbinary patients through:

• Inclusive physical experiences at the clinic (the interior, booklet, information, etc)
• Inclusive registry process and in-take form
• Introduce programs such as the “buddy” program that past transgender patients serve as mentors for the new patients by providing guidance, suggestions, and supports

Narrow down to a team solution

Each of us came up with 2–3 ideas for solving the problems we each identified, which in a way is very similar but in different modalities and representations. As a team, we came up with the solution of focusing on the first goal as we mentioned above by providing more access to the information about the transgender health services the patients are going to get. Some of us did a comparative analysis on NYU Langone’s transgender health page and other medical centers or clinics’ websites on transgender health, and we found out that NYU Langone’s transgender health isn’t as informative and accessible to the patients. One of the most predominant problems the website has is the lack of information on:

• medical providers’ experiences, passion and advocate in transgender health
• available transgender physical health services and surgeries explained in text
• point of person to reach for consultation prior to the appointments
• lack of personable and approachable design of the information about the medical team
• lack of support system (eg. past patients’ experiences and stories, the medical providers’ stories and researches, or the introduction of NYU Langone’s transgender health center)

Our team took a final decision on narrowing it down to one solution that we are going to work on for this project. We aim for a revamp of the current NYU Langone’s website on transgender health, with more built-in features and integration of what is already available out there on other social media channels of NYU Langone. By conducting comparative analysis on transgender health websites of medical centers, our team collectively build on good ideas to implement them into the current transgender health site of NYU Langone.

Next steps

For the next week, our team started to work on the actual design and sketches for revamping the website. After the meeting on Monday by going through everyone’s ideas and sketches, we decide to focus on revamping the following webpages on NYU Langone’s Transgender Health website:

• Homepage
• Our care team
• Doctor’s profile pages
• Creating a new resources page

The information we are working off will be reconstructed and designed in a way that is upfront, transparent, and accessible for all the transgender patients to feel safe about what is being expected with full understanding of the medical providers and services, as well as NYU Langone’s Transgender Helath program as a facilitator to practice.

Reflections

For this week, we decide to have weekly meetings every Monday to check up and prepare for the in-class session we have the next day. Like many other groups, we also use Trello to track down what we are supposed to do every day individually and together; by implementing Agile as an iterative project management process, we try to make this project professional and efficient. The time we have isn’t a lot so we should better plan out how our team can best function and do the work.

All of us want to have this project included on our portfolio sites — with that being said, we all believe in the importance of individual contribution and team effort, and we would like to gather and analyze the pros and cons of each person’s sketches and design in order to come up with a team design that reflects our approach to bringing back the confidence for the transgender patients seeking for medical help. We really want to see how we each thinks about making the medical service comfortable and accessible as designers, so we are trying to leave as much time as we can for each person to really think through the problems and solutions, and gather together to talk and reach an agreement. Giving the time constrain, all of us do feel a bit rushed about this project and how to best utilize our time in and off class, but I think our team is doing a great job in timeboxing and revising our design plan as we go along that everyone is trying extremely hard both themselves and as a team.