Building Team Chemistry: “Project in a Day” internal kickoff
An internal design activity to consolidate understanding of our project, build team chemistry, and quickly ideate potential directions
Although our client kickoff wasn’t for another two weeks, our team wanted to dive right into the problem space with some background research. As there was a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time, our team divided and conquered, with the goal of coming together and sharing our understandings and insights at the end of the week. Over the course of the week of January 21st our team conducted:
- Background research on MedRespond
- A thorough literature review
- A competitive landscape analysis
- Heuristic evaluation of the 3 programs available on the MedRespond website
In order to consolidate our findings and use them as a springboard for initial ideation, we envisioned “Project in a Day” — a 3 hour design sprint that would also serve as our internal kickoff and initiation into the generative research and design aspects of our project. Here’s a quick run through of how to get started.
1. Establish a shared understanding of project background and objectives
We started off by debriefing on our background research and our project objectives. The goal here is to ensure the team has a shared understanding of the market landscape, our client, and the pain points we are expected to address. Note that we will clarify this understanding with our client at the kickoff. Synthesizing all our thoughts about the project and expectations into one “how might we” statement was a great grounding activity. And of course, after we had all our objectives down, we affinitized them!
2. Empathize with your users
Next, we empathized with our users through an exploration of potential use cases and the creation of a lo-fi persona. We started off by listing a large range possible types of users.
We then created a persona for a 76 year old named Bob. Bob values being self reliant, wants to be an active participant in his own care, and doesn’t want to burden his family. He is currently preparing for a hip replacement and has been recommended MedRespond to answer any and all questions he might have about his upcoming surgery. However, he has key issues that act as barriers to use of MedRespond, including lack of English language fluency and lack of techno-literacy.
Bob’s pain points were informed by our background research and heuristic evaluation of the MedRespond platform.
3. Brainstorm the product vision (current product, and preferred future)
Part of our project objectives is to imagine a preferred future for MedRespond and identify opportunities for a more positively affective experience. So once we had a user in mind, we discussed the product vision. Here we wanted to understand the team perspective on the current product and our aspirations for the future — sort of like a before and after. This would allow us to better frame how Bob relates to the platform now, vs how we and our client might like Bob to relate to the platform in the future.
4. Prioritize user needs
After a short break in which we ate snacks (and lamented the lack of variety of snacks in our room), we set off to generate user needs. We set aside 5 minutes for us to generate what we thought were the most important user needs. We then affinitized these needs and wrote higher level “I” statements to encapsulate our categories.
We then used those “I” statements to create a prioritization matrix, which is a chart whose axes are “user value” and “team effort”.
Unsurprisingly our team felt that most of our generated user needs were of high user value. In the future, we will validate these current ideas against our field research in order to best distinguish user needs.
For the purposes of this exercise, we used our knowledge from our background research and group discussions to inform the needs. However during our generative research we will seek to validate and/or disprove these needs, as well as generate richer, deeper insights from interviews with actual users.
5. Brainstorm potential features
Using everything that we had learned that week through our background research, and what we had learned for the past 2 and a half hours of “Project in a Day,” our team brainstormed some potential features.
What stood out to most of us was the potential for gamification to increase patient engagement with the platform and confidence in their retention and comprehension of the material.
6. Create low fidelity prototypes of a potential solution
We had originally planned to create lo-fi prototypes of a solution as well, but time was short and our activity was strictly time boxed to end after 3 hours in order to be most effective. In lieu of prototyping, as a group, we discussed what such a gamified quiz addition to MedRespond would look like, and how it would increase the user experience.
7. Debrief
We ended our activity with a group reflection. Here are some of our take aways:
- PIAD left us feeling excited, confident, and prepared for our project
- We need more snacks for room 229
- Our background research was an important resource
- Our agenda was a good framework for keeping things going and touching in with the goals of each task
- We like working together!
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 thoughts
