Nice to Meet You, MedRespond!
On February 1st 2019, Team Panacea officially kicked off our capstone project, sponsored by our client, MedRespond
As our team left the kick-off meeting on Friday, each one of us was filled with passion and energy. Despite the early morning start and dangerously low temperatures (including an unscheduled snowstorm), we were full of vim and vigor.
We finally got to meet our client, MedRespond, a highly experienced and talented group of professionals who are passionate about improving the quality and experience of patient education. We reached a consensus in terms of our goal, project objectives, and methodologies. Most importantly, both our parties couldn’t wait to get our hands dirty and get started on the project.
It will be a long journey, and we are ready.
Preparing for the Official Kick-off
You might already know that our team had an internal kick-off activity from our last post. However, preparing for the first client facing meeting required much more than a design sprint activity. We didn’t know who our clients were, what their communication style was, what they would expect from us, as well as what we should expect from them.
As our project builds upon trust, we wondered: how could we establish that we are capable and trustworthy in one three-hour meeting? In this section, we will walk you through everything we did to prepare for this meeting.
Background Research
To start off the preparation, we conducted thorough, holistic background research. We began by conducting a competitive analysis on the company in order to better understand the market, the competitors, and the company itself. By comparing MedRespond to three competitors in the field of digital patient engagement & education, we identified Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT). We came to understand both MedRespond’s company mission and their business model.
At the same time, we conducted an initial literature review on the topic of patient engagement and education. The team reviewed 20 peer-reviewed research papers in order to familiarize ourselves with the conversations happening on the topic of interest.
Through this literature review, we learned:
- The effectiveness of using videos as a medium for preparatory patient education has been validated repeatedly
- Discussions on patient empowerment through patient engagement and social groups
- Co-creation of value between healthcare provider and patients
- HCI methodologies in designing for healthcare
We wrapped up our background research by performing some Heuristic Evaluations on MedRespond’s demo product. This process gave us a glimpse of the basic user flow while interacting with the product. We were also able to provide recommendations on improving the current UI according to the heuristics.
Designing a Co-design Activity
After synthesizing all the background research findings among the team, we started brainstorming a co-design activity as part of our kick-off meeting.
The purpose of the activity was to help us take the lead in defining our work style and practices, and demonstrating them to the team. Leveraging this activity, we aimed to break down the monotony of a long meeting, drive collaboration across working styles and disciplines, and spread a culture of collaboration and customer centricity.
As a team, we defined two goals this activity should help us achieve:
- Gain information from the client: What do they know from their prior research? What are their top priorities in terms of product development?
- Convey our design methodology: What’s the user-centered, iterative design process? How would we apply it to the project?
With these goals in mind, we designed our “Preferred Future Ideation” activity, which is a miniature version of a typical design cycle —
- The activity starts out with “Empathizing”. Everyone in the room is asked to write down two or more insights that reveal user pain points. These insights should be drawn from research with real users, and should be ones that stand out the most to each individual.
- The second step is “Affinitizing”. Everyone shares their insights and works together as a group to categorize these pain points.
- The third part is “Prioritizing” using a Prioritization Matrix. As a team, we prioritize the biggest pain points while determining the the amount of value that could be potentially brought to the user, as well as the amount the effort that would be required to solve the problem.
- The fourth part is “Sketching”. Everyone in the room sketches three ideas (one reasonable, one impractical, and one outlandish) to solve the pain point that is prioritized to be the most urgent.
- The last step is “Evaluation”. Everyone reviews the sketches made by others, and discusses one idea that stands out to each of them.
Finally, the Kick-off Day!
Morning of the Kick-Off
On the first day of February, we had our kickoff meeting with MedRespond.
We started off our day with our weekly Faculty Meeting, where we received additional confidence that we were on the right track from our advisors, Chinmay and Matt.
The Meeting
We were incredibly thrilled to have their CEO, Content Director, Creative Director, Development Director, and a Thoracic Surgeon attend our meeting. After introducing each of us in the beginning as the icebreaker, we were able to bring up an engaging conversation with MedRespond team about the scope of the project as well as the background information.
It was a great chance for us to have a group of healthcare experts with tons of experience share their perspectives on patient education. We got to know how they have approached challenges across different projects and target users throughout decades. We also learned the thorough process of how patients get informed and enter the touch-points of the MedRespond product, and how MedRespond tailors the patient experience from time to time. We, as aspiring healthcare experts, also got the chance to share our thoughts based on our preliminary research and the insights from our design workshop “Project in a day”.
After opening the conversation into the background and product details of MedRespond, we gained a deeper understanding of our goals and identified potential opportunities that we could focus on. As everyone got engaged and participated in the flow of our conversation, we were all excited and felt good to proceed to our next step — the co-design activity — and flesh out our thoughts into design practices.
Testing the Co-Design Activity
To get started with the design activity, we asked everyone to write down at least two insights as user pain points. We were glad to see everyone had a lot of insights from their personal and professional experiences. One impressive insight touched upon the topic of how to engage patients when they first enter the website. We learned that MedRespond designed a product for children, which required a special type of audience engagement. To get kids excited about interaction, MedRespond created a cute penguin avatar that introduced visitors to the page with “Hey how are you! How many cokes did you drink this week?” to start a conversation with their users. The kids engaged easily (more easily than with a human their own age), and were stunned when the penguin remembered how many cokes they drank the week before.
Given the time constraint, we didn’t get through the whole design activity, but we indeed developed a new outlook of their product as well as gained a ton of background information. Most importantly, we built rapport with our client MedRespond — the conversation seemed to flow smoothly and naturally and got everyone engaged in the topic. It is clear that all parties are thrilled to get started. We were told that our solutions could be deployed real-time, which gives us even more motivation and drive to succeed!
Key Takeaways
To sum up, these are the takeaways that we got from the KO meeting:
Establishing common ground
The goal of having the kickoff meeting was to have everyone sit down and open the conversation. During the KO meeting, everyone shared their expectations and expertise as a team to build consensus and sync on the same page — landing our understanding and goals for this 7-month long project.
Be prepared, but also be flexible
We would definitely have loved to share everything we had done over the past two weeks with our client. More importantly though, we wanted to hear from our client, too. Our background research successfully helped us participate and contribute insights during the conversation. However, the natural flow and open-ended conversation brought us more insights and topics that we didn’t expect to cover at first, which were great resources for us as well!
Having a successful kickoff meeting really helped keep Team Panacea on track. We received constructive feedback and the confidence to proceed to our next step. Over the following weeks, we will begin to tackle our explorative research phase. We’re now ready to take on more challenges!
Brought to you with love 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 thoughts
