Week 2: Synthesis, Sense-Making
For week 2, we were required to make sense of and coagulate the information we gathered and assimilated through the research conducted over the last couple of weeks. Before the last Ideation and Prototyping class, we had on Tuesday, we as a team had the opportunity to have a candid conversation with Dayna (They/Them). It was a really enlightening conversation as Dayna was ready to answer all our questions to the best of their ability. At the very beginning of our conversation, Dayna thought it was important to mention that they try to visit a doctor as little as possible. After hearing this, most of our questions revolved around this thought Dayna expressed. The detailed notes taken during our meeting with Dayna can be found here.
The biggest takeaways from our conversation were the following:
- Forms like registration forms for vaccines, patient intake forms, etc. are not inclusive enough. The gender column has only two options and most times do not give the option to not answer the question about gender.
- Insensitive attitude and ignorance displayed by clinicians and other staff (eg. x-ray technicians, janitors, etc.) at hospitals and health centers.
- There have been incidents where they had to explicitly mention their gender even though their medical condition was not related to their gender whatsoever.
- The restrooms at most of the hospitals and healthcare facilities (eg. pop-up covid vaccine tents ) are not gender-inclusive. They usually have just male and female (gender binary) restrooms, making it uncomfortable for those who don't identify by either.
- A lot of the language on things like forms or name labels needs to be updated to include pronouns, birth certificates (parent instead of mother and father) could use more gender-neutral forms.
- When asked about what process they go through before choosing a hospital to go into, they said: Since they live in a rural area, they don't have many options on what kinda hospitals they can go to, but ideally they would look up if the hospital is more inclusive and if these options are covered under their health insurance.
- And finally, when asked about any positive experiences they have had dealing with the healthcare sector, they said they have no such positive experiences they can recall.
After our class session on Tuesday, we had a Studio workshop and started working on synthesizing the information we gathered the past week and started to lay them out and categorize them logically on our MURAL board.
We started this process by categorizing the problems and challenges we identified into 4 categories: Interpersonal challenges, Institutional challenges, Environmental challenges, and finally Marketing challenges.
Using this breakup, we formulated a Value/Effort Matrix to help us identify and narrow down to which type of challenge we want to target head-on with this project.
Clearly, the most desirable category would be that which is of high importance and high feasibility which in this case are the Interpersonal challenges.
Following this, we moved on to defining our persona and one interaction that this individual has with a healthcare facility.
As shown in the above picture, Our persona is Riley(They/Them) who is a 30-year-old individual who identifies as Non-Binary. The scenario we are focusing on is the following: Riley, unfortunately, finds themselves with a joint injury on the wrist from a terrible fall they had a couple of days prior. They hesitate initially to look for help but the pain keeps increasing and now Riley has no choice but to seek help. They look up hospitals online and find Hospital X’s contact. They then download the mobile app the website mentions to book an appointment to meet with a Doctor. After booking an appointment, Riley fills up an online form informing the concerned generic information about Riley. Post this, Riley visits the hospital on the day of their appointment and is not greeted to satisfaction. This sets the tone for the rest of Riley’s stay at the hospital. The image above details the steps Riley takes until their treatment at the hospital and finally checkout from the hospital.
We proceeded to further analyze the information we had and formulated and identified touchpoints, user goals, etc. This can be seen in the image below.
After this stage, We tried to narrow down our scope and focus and started thinking about how we can start to tackle these issues. The following shows our current thought on how we can tackle interpersonal challenges faced by Transgender/Non-Binary/Genderqueer patients and what our desired outcome through our service is.
As a next step, We will be presenting our work and will then take the feedback and make constructive changes if needed. For the following week, we will start the Ideation and Prototyping stage of the project.
