Sprint 2: Exploring the problem space
Recap from Sprint 1
In the last sprint, we held kickoff meetings with PA WIC and planned for our primary and secondary research.
Check our last sprint here 👉🏼 sprint 1
Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!
During our second sprint, we actively recruited WIC participants to conduct semi-structured interviews with and learn from them. We created surveys for participants and staff to get a little bit more of their background information and sent them a link to schedule interviews. We created a flyer with the survey and recruited through many different channels, including Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit groups. We also reached out to dozens of local organizations and WIC local agency directors to ask for their help in recruiting, in addition to posting flyers throughout Pittsburgh.
Outreach
We visited four different local stores that are partnered with PA WIC in Squirrel Hill, Wilkinsburg and in the East Liberty area. We handed out flyers and asked cashiers to distribute them to the WIC participants when they are checking out.
Challenges 🤯
We realized that finding and interviewing participants are really challenging during this time period. We identified a few challenges that might hinder participants from participating in our interview. Primarily, we understand how unpredictable and time-consuming caring for children can be. We assumed our participants, being mothers, might find it challenging to sit down with student researchers for up to an hour. In addition, many of our participants speak English as a second language, in which an interpreter would need to be present. Lastly, we use Zoom as our main communication tool but many of our participants are not familiar as with the platform.
Stakeholder Interviews and Background Research
As we worked through the difficulties around recruiting participants, we set up interviews with nutritionists and directors of WIC offices, IT staff, and employees from PA WIC, and pediatricians from clinics serving WIC Participants. This provided us with a more holistic perspective of the WIC program and its services and led to a number of insights:
1. Trust and Relationships are Critical — “So many of our families are judged…you just want to give them a safe space. Where they feel comfortable and appreciated”
2. For many participants, WIC is low on their list of priorities, but reducing friction can lead to them prioritizing it higher — “I don’t think WIC is a high priority for most people. [..] If we make it easier for them to receive the benefit, that is going to be a big help”
3. Clinics and staff must be adaptable — “We are trying to lower the barrier by different means. We allow 3 proxies to get their services for them. In response to covid, we are thinking of different ways to reload their cards easier. Potentially have people reload at the grocery store at the cash register, kiosk or customer service area. Maybe at daycare or pediatricians offices, anywhere they want to reload it.”
4. The larger context can’t be ignored — “A healthy lifestyle sounds good in a vacuum.”
A lot of other factors are influencing the participants’ choices. By discovering these insights, we not only gained a better understanding of the WIC experience, but we also were better equipped to redesign our participant research strategy.
Pretotyping — Be creative, flexible and take risks
Taking these on as creative challenges, we generated multiple ideas to reach out to and retain WIC participants. We also planned to use this opportunity to do something more than just interviews — our next step is to pretotype. Based on the interviews we conducted, we identified four probes that we want to test and focus on in our pretotype.
4 Probes
- Priority — The participants deeply appreciate the financial benefits of the program, but oftentimes don’t prioritize going into the clinics or the nutritional education the program offers. Many participants also don’t stay in the program through their eligibility.
- Usage — Participants don’t always use all the food benefits they receive as sometimes they don’t fit into the diet or eating habits of their family. Food benefits are not as flexible or customizable as many participants hope.
- Relationship — Most participants we interviewed mentioned that WIC staff is friendly and welcoming. However, most participants also mentioned that they do not have a personal connection with any WIC staff, and some said they don’t feel heard by them. WIC staff could build closer relationships with the participants through methods like SMS communication and consistent meetings with the same nutritionists.
- Visiting Clinic Experience — Difficulty getting to the clinic (transportation), long wait times, and/or unpleasant waiting room experiences prevent participants from feeling excited to go to WIC clinics in person.
We have generated many different ideas to test the above probes for our pretotype (are these actually the biggest challenges WIC participants are facing? Would addressing these probes actually bring value to them?). Initially, we have learned that many PA WIC clinics experience no-shows or late-shows for patient appointments, low retention rates, and lack of prioritization of the services and benefits WIC provides. We have also learned of the significance that positive and strong relationships between PA WIC staff, WIC peer counselors, and families can have on the overall impact and perception of PA WIC in the caregivers’ lives. These insights presented us with gaps that we wish to explore.
Idea 1. Relationship building experiment with text message
We aimed to understand if fostering a relationship with WIC participants could encourage their continued involvement in the program and eventually raise the level of prioritization and perceived value of WIC in their lives. Assuming that frequent and repeated exposure to one person allows for more opportunities to build trust and eventually greater prioritization of the PA WIC organization as a whole, we set up this experiment with the form of text message interactions over a week (or two-week) period.
Control Group Interaction
The control group participant would receive 1 text message (or similar interaction) from a WICked Nutrition team member. Later, they would interact with a different member during the experimental period.
Experimental Group Interaction
The experimental group participant would receive multiple and more personalized text messages (or similar interactions) from a WICked Nutrition team member. Later, they would interact with the same member during the experimental period.
Idea 2. Speed Dating with Storyboards
After getting feedback from faculty advisors, we decided to generate more ideas by using speed dating, a design method for rapidly exploring different concepts and their interactions and contextual dimensions using storyboards. We created different storyboards that represent new possible interactions between participants and WIC staff. However, during our in-class critique, we received feedback that this activity might unintentionally lead the participants to think that they need certain solutions when they actually do not. In other words, we want to avoid giving them the idea that they might need certain things, and instead learn what they actually need.
Idea 3. Need-finding
In order to better identify WIC participants’ biggest needs and the biggest challenges they face, we hope to do a need-finding activity, an interactive activity with participants that will help us research this question:
How might we understand the greatest needs of our participants?
How can we probe into the (1) Prioritization of WIC services (2) Waiting room experience, and (3) PA WIC Participant Retention?
Step1. We will have problem statements on cards (e.g. “My busy schedule with my children makes it difficult for me to find time to visit the WIC clinic.”)
Step2. We will ask participants to “flip” or identify the cards that have problem statements that pertain to them
Step 3. We will have them rank the cards by dragging, sorting, or color coding them based on the severity of the problem
Evaluate what is working and not working and continue to refine
Identifying a few challenges, we refined the way we recruited participants. Instead of providing only Zoom calls, we added an option to do phone calls. We also shortened the regular interview time from an hour to thirty minutes, but kept the hour-long interview as an option so that participants who are willing to participate for longer and have access to Zoom can still participate as we originally planned. Lastly we doubled our compensation to attract more participants. We also got access to PA WIC’s mass text messaging service, which allows us to send SMS messages about our project to large groups of WIC participants at once. We will be reaching out to more participants and are hoping to gain some more insights!
See you in the next sprint! 👋🏼
