Week3. Ideation & Prototyping

How Might We statement

How might we create a step by step toolkit for fostering empathy, providing prompts, and improving the initial check-in experience of trans/non-binary/genderqueer patients?

This week, we brought our “how might we” statement to the class and received some constructive feedback.

The most questioned part is the “toolkit”. In design, toolkits provide guidelines and syntax that are applicable to the complexity of problems.

However, in reality, healthcare employees have to receive institutional training during their job onboarding, and the toolkit usually must be implemented into the training program if it exists. Adding a toolkit to its training program seems to take it away from the problem we are trying to solve. It is difficult to implement and even if it is, there is little correlation between designing a training program and how it affects the visiting experience of our target audiences. Toolkit refers to a much broader and more universal system, far beyond the scope of our project.

The suggestion was that instead of creating a new tool, we could work with existing tools or products that people are already familiar with.

Ideation Session

And this week, my team started ideating. Each team member sketched three ideas, and we presented them in the group meeting.

Collecting Ideas on Mural

We surprisingly found out some of us have similar ideas, and we decided to group them into 4 categories.

• Application
• Name badge/tag
• AR environment
• Tangible/physical things as solution

We decided to abandon some infeasible ideas, and we used Post-it Voting to select the ideas each of us liked the most.

As a result, we abandoned ideas of using AR to create experience and physical things as solutions for the following reasons:

The AR experience requires changing the physical environment, so adoption will not be guaranteed to be easy for our target audience. Additionally, this would potentially expand the scope of our project since creating AR experiences will demand more technical skills, and it seems unfeasible to our team.

With physical things as a solution, we are concerned about accessibility when it comes to design, and if we create an exclusive experience for our target audience, it will potentially delay their access to normal healthcare. Prior to adding any physical items to the visiting experience, many research will need to be conducted.

Both two ideas both revolved around recognizing patients’ LGBTQ identity rather than focusing on providing unbiased services and experiences.

Idea Selection

Several of our ideas are centered on using name badges during a hospital visit, but we wanted to combine some other ideas and be creative with them.

Next Step

Try prototyping more ideas and visualizing how it works. We will be following the Journey map as an entry point to see how we could bring a solution to the user’s pain point.

Here are several questions to think about during our second round of prototyping:

• What questions to ask the patients?
• Names & Pronouns are important to our target audience, but how do we help them feel accepted and included?
• What more can we do to make it interactive?
• What are the best ways to let our target audience show their personalities?
• Is the solution able to humanize our target audiences?