Week 3: initial ideas and prototypes
So far, we have spent 2 weeks learning and researching about health disparities for the transgender community. Our group followed the method that each member does their own research, and bring the findings to the weekly meeting for group synthesis. At the moment, our group has pretty much defined our problem statement, as well as the potential solution we have to solve the problem within the following 2 weeks.
Problem statement
In the previous research, our group found that all the problems and challenges that we found transgender patients face while seeking medical services through academic reviews, news articles, and interviews, are all rooted in one big problem umbrella: TRUST. This can include:
- The trust to the medical insurance system that transgender and gender non-binary patients are in a disadvantage in insurance coverage
- The trust to the medical providers that they are not well-educated enough on transgender-particular medical conditions and services
- The trust to the medical providers including physicians, nurses, and receptionists that they are not well-trained to treat transgender and gender non-binary patients that is not abusive, aggressive, attacking, or discriminative.
Here is how we land up our team’s How Might We statement:
HOW MIGHT WE best 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 and discrimination.
Design solutions
Among the many solutions members of our team proposed, we decided to work on revamping the current Langone Transgender website by re-organizing and re-designing the current information that Langone has at the moment into a more transparent, upfront and personable online presence to make the transgender patients trust Langone’s transgender health medical services and providers.
Trust is hard to rebuild once it’s lost. It is an issue that a lot of businesses and industries have been trying to get customers’ trust. Here is a list of online tactics that our team can focus on while designing the information re-architecture and user interface in order to win back that “trust” from the transgender patients:
Overall, our revamping project involves five major construction of the current website:
- Homepage (contact, navigation bar, fix ‘our team of doctors’ to include tabs, learn more, etc; chatbox, brief/general badge explanation, etc)
- Doctor Page: review system & tabs/badges (personal effort), include video introduction placeholder
- Storyboarding of a doctor’s video introduction (3–4 minutes)
- Redesign Our care team that shows the doctors’ name, title, pronouns, specialties as well as buttons to read more about this doctor and make an appointment
- Resources (psychological/mental care, discrimination reporting, patient stories, etc)
Our group decided to divide the tasks to each person to conquer; on our weekly meeting on Monday, we each would come with the prototype we have worked on with a comparison of the current website (if available) to discuss.
Group synthesis
This week’s group synthesis is basically going through each member’s prototype in comparison to the original website as well as the design rationale behind it. During the process, we discussed the issues that emerged during the design process that including the location of a specific feature or tab, and the visual layouts and elements. We reached an agreement of what we as a group like as a design solution to proceed onto the next iteration of the design process, which is a high-fidelity prototype.
Concerns and next steps
Our team is still working on getting more user interviews or potential participants for conducting a short think-aloud session on our current prototype. So far, we are still having a hard time recruiting participants, but finally, we have 2–3 people who said that they would be willing to help us out from Blessing’s contacts. Stories and insights from the target users can be extremely helpful to understand user behaviors, as well as build persona and user journey maps. Our group has been putting on a persona and user journey map in the last few weeks, only because we think creating a persona based on our research findings is not ideal that it is entirely our assumptions. Since we finally might have some people willing to do interviews with us, we will start to work on those as well as the interviews proceed. Our goal is to try to do at least one user testing on one of our prototypes and then iterate the design; after that, we are looking for having the questions and approaches ready for the next round of user testing once our second prototype is ready. Time is a major concern, while our team is mindful of that and trying to lay out the tasks for each iteration as much as we can.
Self-reflections
I always feel ashamed but also grateful every time when I do my research: I am ashamed to learn that transgender patients are facing so many challenges both mentally and systematically when seeking medical service, while most of the patients out of the LGBTQ community do not usually face or even see as obstacles; but also I am grateful that NYU Langone initiated this project with us on a pretty vague level and encourage us to make the change for the transgender and non-binary patients. To me, it doesn’t matter if our team solution and design are going to be implemented or not, but it is meaningful that I learned something that I have never learned or known about, and all the considerations and analysis happened in the design process would benefit me in the future as a designer who really thinks about accessibility and user behaviors.
Working with my team is a lot of fun too that all of us have a focus on UI/UX research and design, while each person has their own unique skills that can benefit the teamwork the most. We are constantly helping each other out and learning from each other, which is a really interesting and insightful learning journey for me personally.
