Blowing Things Apart!
…And Stitching Them Back Together Again
Getting in the rhythm of rapid design and prototyping to finish out our final semester of the MedRespond capstone project
Back in the ‘burgh — what’s next?
After returning from our most recent field visit to Cleveland, we realized we had been relying on our original main design from the spring and had been hesitant to make massive design changes after getting so comfortable with the existing concept. Feedback from our Cleveland trip demonstrated to us a few key things:
- Our design needed a clearer display of where information is located in the platform, be it through clearer progressive disclosure, improved on-boarding, or a combination of both.
- Our design needed to reflect a deeper understanding of our user base — Unsurprisingly, we are still not the user! We needed to go deeper with outside quantitative and accessibility research to best understand the patient and caregiver populations’ needs.
- Field research with transplant caregivers demonstrated the importance of caregiver-specific resources — In our spring presentation, we had already highlighted the dichotomy of informational/emotional needs as they vary between caregivers and patients. Based on this insight and our supporting research, we needed to further implement caregiver features in our platform to support their specific informational or emotional needs.
After digesting these findings, we immediately launched into a research-design-build-test cycle, where every week would be focused on waves of research, design, prototyping and testing. This falls perfectly in line with the Nielsen Norman Design Thinking methodology, whereby designers engage in multiple cycles of the design process to encourage innovation and keep the user’s need central to the design process.
So what have we designed?
So far, we’ve had three design sprints focusing on different features of the platform. Each week, a few of us would create parallel prototypes of the feature, meet to discuss the merits of each design, and build a consolidated prototype for evaluative feedback the following week. Below are a selected few examples of some of the parallel prototypes we built:
While we have far too many prototypes to show in one Medium post, some of the big findings from our few weeks of design include:
Immersive Mode
Immersive mode allows users to jump right into the conversation with the videos, asking questions like they were engaging in a live Skype conversation with the MedRespond spokesperson. The main goal of this concept was to allow patients to fully plug in to the learning experience without feeling distracted by other features on the platform.
Enhanced CUI experience
Our big mission this summer was to focus on redesigning the conversational user interface experience to be more intuitive and feel closer to a real in-person interaction. Our CUI allows users to interact with the videos suggested by MedRespond, interact with and highlight parts of the video transcript, and take and export notes to additional parties. We modeled many of these interactions off of principles of good chat user interface design as well as by mimicking the conversational flow patients would have with their doctors.
Emphasizing Social/Emotional Resources
From our research, we determined that patients and caregivers not only have a great informational need, but also great social and emotional needs as well. In our parallel prototyping, we focused on how to include these outside resources to patients beyond just the informational content, getting us closer to the goal of making the patient feel loved through demonstrating empathy for what they are going through with affective design and helping them feel empowered about the future by providing resources and ways to unplug.
Feedback Loop — Getting the Patient Perspective
After getting extremely valuable feedback from our Cleveland trips, we reaffirmed the need for ongoing user feedback throughout our design cycle. While Cleveland was a great source for information, it wasn’t feasible to go out every weekend for field research, so we needed to look closer. Testing on our cohort also had its own limitations as our classmates are still not the user and aren’t representative of our typical transplant user base.
With great luck, we managed to connect with Family House, a local transplant house facility a mere few blocks away from our lab. Family House is an organization that runs residential facilities located around the Oakland area meant to provide accommodations to patients and caregivers in town for hospital stays. They were gracious enough to let us come by and interview their patients and caregivers for real user feedback on our prototypes.
In addition to Family House research, we’ve performed extensive think-alouds and guerilla research on our family, friends, and extended social network, getting feedback from non-technical and senior audiences as well as non-designer audiences.
Finally, to support our ongoing evaluative research, we have also been running supporting quantitative research and literature review of liver transplant patient demographics, caregiver demographics, and accessibility research with a special focus on cognitive impairment. This research helps us keep our design artifacts up to date and ensure that when designing for the user, we are designing for the right user.
Finally, as a side note, we also have made a practice of piloting and performing think-aloud roleplaying before user testing sessions. By roleplaying as unfamiliar or nontechnical users, we can identify gaps in our experimental design and address them before we test on real users.
So what’s left?
While we are in the midst of one of our design cycles, there is realistically only a month left. What’s Team Panacea’s plan for focusing our final product design and finishing the MHCI program strong?
Building out the final desktop and mobile design
We spent most of the semester focusing on getting the right design for desktop. While we finalize and begin to build out our final high-fidelity interactive prototype for desktop, we are also transitioning to mobile design. One of our key findings from research was that in order to get on the list for a liver transplant, users need to have a caregiver and a phone (but not necessarily a computer). Having a mobile app also allows users the flexibility of learning and taking information on-the-go, which is especially important given the number of appointments and check-ups that patients must attend.
Transitioning our project for smooth handoff
While this project has been our baby for the past few months, it’s important to think ahead and have a plan for handing the design back to the client at the end of the semester. While our team has had some experience collaborating with developers on other projects in the past, it’s important for us to create a detailed design kit for the current iteration of our design as well as a product roadmap detailing how potential features would fit in the preferred future of MedRespond. As the program comes to a close, we will have a fully fleshed out product roadmap for our clients to make it as easy as possible to pick up where we left off.
Remembering to take breaks and look out for our well-being
To quote Europe’s one-hit wonder: “It’s the FINAL COUNTDOWN”. With one month left in the program, it’s easy to let the work pile up and get overwhelmed by how much there is left to do. While our team has done a great job so far of maintaining a work-life balance, now, more than ever, we need to make sure we are working efficiently and effectively. We made it this far; now let’s finish this semester strong! 💪
As a side note, to the future MHCIers who may be reading this, going to the Group-X classes is a great way to unwind as a team (and also stay fit)!
Stay tuned for more design shenanigans from Team Panacea 💚
About this PublicationWe’re writing the MHCI 2019 Capstone: Team Panacea Publication for a couple of reasons.First, we want to give you an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of our capstone experience: the successes, failures, thoughts, insights, and innovations.Second, we would love to engage with you around the healthcare domain (Pittsburgh’s #1 industry!), so please follow / clap👏👏👏 / comment / share /reach out to us — we’d love to hear your thoughtsFinally, check out our ongoing project page for updates here!
