Week 4: Hi-fi prototype and usability testing
For this week, our group focused on polishing up the prototype we created last week from a mid-fi prototype to a hi-fi prototype, with the existing information and content added to each page. We’ve also conducted a round table interview with four potential users to understand their opinions and suggestions about transgender health, as well as usability testing on the prototype we come up with.
Our solution
We aim to rebuild the trust that has been lost between transgender patients and medical providers through building a more accessible, transparent, and supportive online environment for making medical decisions. We decided to re-organize and re-design the current information that NYU Langone and the transgender health team have at the moment into a transparent and upfront online presence to help the transgender patients to fully understand and expect the medical services and the doctors at Langone with a comprehensive and personable approach. Here are the five major areas we are working on to revamp the transgender health website:
- Homepage (contact information, a chatbox system, brief/general badge explanation, etc)
- Doctor Page: review system & tabs/badges (personal effort and research), include video introduction.
- 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)
The Hi-fi Prototype
Each of us is assigned to one or two areas to work. Based on our analysis and discussion from last week, each of us worked on revising the layout and adding more content to the framework. Now, most of the pages look like real web pages, based on our visual guide and assets that I and Yixun created for the team.
My assignment is to recreate “our care team” on the original transgender health page. The problems I found for the original layout are:
- No pictures of the doctors: this creates a loss of safe and relatedness with the patients
- No descriptions of each specialty and their relationship with transgender health issues in particular
- Inconsistent information for doctors and supporting staff (things like pronouns, etc)
- Heavy text and no visual cues on this page makes it harder to scan and pick out information that the patients need
I came up with this stacking card design for each doctor featuring their basic information and scheduling info. Also, I have provided a short introduction for each specialty that explains its relationship to transgender health — this is going to be extremely helpful for some new patients to make a decision which doctor to look for in terms of their personal medical needs. I grabbed the text from Mount Sinai’s transgender care team as placeholders, while ideally, NYU Langone would have come up with their own wording of introducing their medical services for transgender patients in specific.
I also helped one of my teammates to build the doctor’s profile pages, with some reconstructions of the information and layout. Our team found the information for each doctor of the transgender health team is extremely inconsistent. It is understandable that those doctors are not just providing services for transgender patients, but it is a lack of trust being built that they are on the transgender health team but almost no information about their passions and efforts in transgender health issues. We decided to add the following features:
- LGBTQ Badges claiming for the doctors’ own efforts and office environment for LGBTQ (including transgender patients)
- A more comprehensive introduction profile written by the doctors themselves, with a video accompanied to show more “person” aspects of them. The doctors can choose either to write or shoot a video, but some information about their personal effort, or research, or passion towards transgender patients should be told through stories.
- Transgender-specific conditions and treatments being pointed out for the trans patients for their references
- Adding a patient review system to the doctor (somewhat like ZocDoc reviewing system)
Interviews & usability testing
Huge progress we made is that we finally did a user interview and usability testing on our prototype. We invited two participants who identified themselves as trans or non-binary to answer some general interview questions about their experiences of seeking medical services and providers, as well as their feedback and opinions on our existing prototypes.
We used an interesting way of conducting a group interview instead of a 1–1 interview setting. This is the first time for every one of my team to do an interview like this because we would like to provide a supportive and relaxing interview session instead of a “serious” q&a session that would bring a lot of awkwardness to the interviewees. Luckily, it went smoothly and we got a lot of great insights, and both of our interviewees liked to be interviewed in a group setting that they do not feel as awkward or being treated as like “talking to a trans person”.
Some interesting insights about seeking medical services we got are that both of our interviewees do think the trust towards the doctors they are looking for is extremely important. One of the ways that they collect information and reviews of a certain doctor is through word of mouth, whether it’s from other transgender friends, therapists, community organizations, online forums or even Reddit, that they do intense research on the doctors they are going to visit instead of visiting a random doctor. One of them also mentioned the importance of knowing the doctor’s personal engagement or passion about treating trans patients would be a critical factor for them to decide whether this doctor is a good choice or not, despite the specific medical needs. Mental health and community resources are also something the two interviewees have been mentioning and talking about that they think many medical clinics have been lacking. One of them said something that really strikes me a lot: “The world is already set up against us so we need all the help we can get. If my mental health is being taken good care of, many of my physical health won't be as severe as they do.”
Even though this is a general interview session before we actually sit and introduce what we made changes to the current NYU Langone Transgender Health page, many of them actually hit the pain points that our team identified before based on our research findings. We showed our prototype and the current webpage to the interviewees with some basic explanations (acting like an A/B testing format) to gather some information and feedback, and overall, the interviewees were pretty impressed and fond of the changes that we made in terms of coherences and actual applications of the resources and information as if they are using the website.
Next steps
Can’t believe the presentation is in less than two weeks! Our team is currently working on the second iteration of our hi-fi prototype. We haven’t decided that if we would work on the actual design, or come up with a general plan for the future we would like to do if we have more time. Presentation is also a huge part of our deliverables — we are under discussion of how we should present our design in a more compelling, interesting, and engaging way that convinces our sponsors that our solutions actually solve the problems we identified.
Personal reflections
I am really excited that we finally had a chance to talk with the potential users. Four of us were so worried about our solution earlier because it is entirely based on research and “what we assume”. Even though it is not an intense user interview, it is really helpful to actually hear from transgender folks sharing their stories when seeking medical services, as well as what they think can be improved in order to reconstruct the patient-medical provider bond in a more transparent, supportive and friendly way.
Even though we were trying to follow the double diamond design process, we actually end up doing the design first and then usability testing on our version 2 prototype. That is pretty good progress for us that we can utilize the results and insights we have to come back to validate our solutions, as well as create the persona and journey map, and most importantly, the next steps for the design iteration processes. Design is after all an iterative process, and we constantly go back to fix and edit what we already had with more information and resources to make our prototype a better solution to the problems.
