Case Study
We started our research process with broad explorations of potential stakeholders, ranging from parents and caregivers through to school administrators and national organizations like the EPA. We also looked at a broad range of data sources that could be integrated into our service, focusing mainly on different types of asthma triggers such as pollen, dust, and tobacco smoke.
In tandem to our exploratory research efforts, we got in touch with people we knew who had asthma during their childhood. Josef has known Austin for 9 years but never knew that he went through challenges with Asthma. Here’s the full conversation we had. This lack of awareness about asthma is a key insight we saw throughout our research.
To compliment our exploratory and primary research, we looked into some secondary sources to find out what population would be the most in need for our service. We found that asthma severity is higher in minority populations, such as Puerto Rican, American-Indian/Alaskan Native, African American, and Filipino populations.
Additionally, we found that people living in low-income areas are more likely to have higher levels of indoor allergens, which we knew from our exploratory research were common asthma triggers. As shown in the pie graphs above, households with lower income (<$40,000) are more likely to have high allergen burdens than households with higher income levels.
In our initial brainstorming sessions, our ideas remained broad even though we had zeroed in on a target audience of lower income minority groups. We knew we wanted our service to provide personalized data and educational information in order to address the lack of awareness issue we saw. However, it wasn’t until we zeroed in on an even smaller target audience of alternative caregivers — like grandparents — that we were really able to make some progress on differentiating our service.
We decided it made sense to focus on grandparents because more grandparents are living with their grandchildren in general, and, in particular, minority families are more likely to include grandparents that live at home. Many grandparents act as their grandchild’s caregiver occasionally or regularly.
Having decided on this specific population, we looked into entry points for our service. While any organization serving low income, minority grandparents could provide an entry point for our service, we decided to focus on food pantries because they represent an already existing service linked to health that serves our target population. For instance, food pantries typically serve individuals and families earning less than 150% of the federal poverty line. In our case, we focused on the Northside Food Pantry for our research. The Northside Food Pantry serves primarily seniors, veterans and families who live in the 15212, 15214 and 15233 zip codes. These zip codes have larger minority populations than average in Pittsburgh.
The grandparents we talked to confirmed that they did act as caregivers for their grandchildren. One interviewee said when he takes his son to the playground, it seems like as many as 60% of the caregivers are grandparents as well. Most of the grandparents we talked to said that they didn’t know how to help their grandchildren with their asthma. One interviewee said her grandchild’s doctor didn’t provide information about how to manage his asthma. When we ran our ideas about a newsletter, app, and in-person consultations by participants, we received enthusiasm for all three ideas. However, some participants said a smartphone app might be difficult for them to navigate without the help of their grandchildren. Here’s our detailed notes from our interviews.
This gave us enough feedback to start blueprinting our service, based on our value flow diagram, personas, and stakeholder map. We did several blueprints for several different scenarios (see them all here). This gave us insight into areas of opportunity, such as including a tear-away page on our magazine in order to remind parents when they could go back to the food pantry to talk with a medical resident, rather than having email or text message reminders, as our population preferred other forms of communication such as in-person or paper-based.
With a service blueprint in mind, we were ready to start prototyping our service touchpoint ideas, including in-person medical resident consultations and a childrens’ magazine. As we were prototyping our children’s magazine, we were inspired by resources we found from PBS and Head Start, which focused on using games, stories, and creativity to help children learn self-management skills. We also looked in existing children’s magazines, such as Ladybug and Jack and Jill for inspiration.
At this point we decided to pivot away from a data intensive service to using data sparingly, because based on interviews our population has less access to the technology that would enable a data-heavy service. Further, we decided we wanted our educational materials to be kid-friendly, so our data visualizations are extremely simplified so that young elementary school children can understand them. The data sources we drew upon for these simple visualizations are:
When we went back to the food pantry to get reactions to our prototypes, we found that our magazine and consultations were well received. However, our service was missing something that could provide on-demand information. Here’s our notes from all of our service experiments.
Having gotten positive reception to our magazine and consultation, we went ahead and developed materials for these touchpoints in high fidelity. Our coloring page turned out to be the greatest source of teamwork — the final illustration is the result of three of us all trying our hand!
To address the need for on-demand information, we decided to develop a hotline and website, although we hadn’t originally included these as part of our service. Along with some promotional flyers for the food pantry to display advertising the consultation schedules, we arrived at final designs for our touchpoints.
