Week 3 — Method 4 & 5
When patients arrive at a vision center, they must go through the check-in process and spend time in the waiting room before their appointment. Because the waiting room is an inevitable part of the patient’s experience, we are interested in finding ways to utilize the time spent during wait times to improve patient health literacy, build confidence before the appointment, and create a safe, comfortable space for patients and caregivers.
According to online research, patients value togetherness in the waiting rooms. We are interested in creating material that connects patients and caregivers and encourages conversation. This could allow caregivers to better understand the needs of the patients and their conditions.
Lately we have been diving too deep into thinking about solutions with little information about low vision patient experiences and interactions within waiting rooms. As a result, we decided to take a step back and continue secondary research, which would then lead us into creating a persona and thinking about the patient’s experience in the waiting room. By mapping out touch points, we hope to get a better understanding of what patients and caregivers experience before, during, and after interacting with the waiting room. We hope to identify pain points in the experience and get a better understanding of the types of emotions felt in the space. Through interviews and conversations with low vision patients, we hope to validate the personas and patient journey and find opportunities to incorporate a design intervention. Based on these conversations, we will continue updating the outline and create a more solid journey map.
Along with our research, the Q&A with Gretchen and Deepan was a great resource to give us insight into the waiting room experience. We used this information to guide our journey map and write out a narrative about a patient entering the space and sitting in a waiting room.
Common interactions in waiting rooms (according to Gretchen and Deepan):
- Patients are commonly accompanied by caregivers which include spouses, family members, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and hired help.
- Wait times can range from a few minutes to several hours depending on the complexity of the condition.
- For complex conditions that require rare specialists, it is common that wait times are longer and broken up throughout the appointment.
- Patients are sometimes given intake forms that must complete before the appointment. They can be in the form of worksheets or iPads with a questionnaire or survey.
- There is currently not a system to provide wait time estimates, so patients and caregivers stay in the waiting room.
- TVs, magazines, informational material, and legal documentation (HIPAA) are present in the waiting room. Patients sometimes bring their own reading material or they chat with who they came with.
- Caregivers also spend a lot of time in waiting rooms. There are outpatient surgeries that caregivers sit through, which sometimes makes them feel anxious.
Gretchen and Deepan also provided a case study about a low vision patient and her experiences. This is her story:
She is a 75 year old woman from Squirrel Hill with cone rod dystrophy. Her disease showed up later in life and progressed more quickly in her left eye compared to her right eye. Her condition started with seeing black spots and has now progressed into issues with depth perception, particularly in low light environments. She is a retired English teacher so reading was a big part of her life, however because of her condition she is unable to read which has left a large emotional and physical toll on her. She lives with her boyfriend who does the driving, shopping, cooking, and laundry for her. She does not use a smartphone and has had negative experiences with technology because of the small text on screens. While her boyfriend helps with some medical needs, she values independence and self-advocacy and is able to take care of herself and manage her own appointments.
This case study gave us an idea of one type of patient we could be working with. If patients have frequent checkups that involve time consuming imaging tests, they could be spending significant amounts of time in the waiting rooms with the caregivers that accompanied them.
[Method 4]
Before doing another iteration of method 4, we went back to finding pain points of a waiting room through various types of research articles. After further discussion, we wanted to focus on communication / bond building between caregivers and patients. Based on the talk with Gretchen & Deepan and the research we did, we saw the waiting time before an appointment as the perfect opportunity to focus on educating both patients and caregivers through interactive materials (i.e. flash cards).
[Method 5]
Sophia’s Reflection
For the method 5 exercise, I was paired up with Jenna. Through this exercise, I was able to get to know Jenna a little bit more. For example, I really enjoyed covering values and perspectives and getting a better understanding of her morals. It was nice to see how this can be applied to future interviews and how it can also be used for persona building. However, after doing method 5, I felt like the activity could have had more context because when I was asking questions, it seemed to be too broad. For example, when I asked “what skills and knowledge do you have?” Jenna was very unsure how to answer. She asked, “in the context of design? Everyday life activities? Conversations skills?” I believe that if the instructions were more refined and a little bit more specific, the activity would have resulted in more details / information.
Hannah’s Reflection
I found method 5 to be an interesting exploration of “thick data,” but it was very confusing trying to complete it without any context or direction for research. The physical and digital objects someone is connected to within a patient care setting are quite different from the ones they’re connected to on a daily basis within their own homes, and since we were unsure what sort of context or setting we were supposed to be asking each other about, we ended up just asking about each others’ daily lives. Additionally, since we were all paired with our classmates (I was paired with Jaclyn), we already all knew each other to some extent, and many of us shared commonalities as well — for example, Jaclyn and I are both from the Bay Area. It seems like the aim of method 5 is to develop fairly personal personas based on users you interview, which I do think could be an effective approach. One thing I did appreciate about the exercise was that since it was pretty unstructured, Jaclyn and I had a pretty organic conversation while interviewing each other, and we both learned a bit more about each other, which was fun!
Eunice’s Reflection
The template for method 5 was an interesting way to prompt potential interview questions for our audience. It captured a holistic view of the objects and networks that the interviewee interacts with daily, along with the more high level values that they live their life by. For this activity, I was paired with Elizabeth. We do not know each other very well so I thought that the activity was an effective way for us to get to know each other better. The simplicity of the prompts allowed us to have a smooth conversation that led into more specific topics which made it seem like we were having more of a conversation than conducting an interview. Moving forward with our research, I hope to continue practicing having fluid conversations with our audience because there is a lot of value in building connections and sharing personal stories. One thing that helped the conversation between Elizabeth and I was that we were able to connect over being Asian American women. While this commonality started off as being surface level, we were able to go deeper with our conversations because there was a sense of trust built between us. After debriefing with my group, we all agreed that for the purposes of our project, more context would help us and our audience gain richer insights. Some of the questions about high level values were difficult to answer because they were too broad, however I do think that our group can tailor our interview to be more relevant to our subject matter.
