How I taught User Research in a Hospital

✏️ What I did, challenges faced and learnings

The start of a movement

During my 2 years as a Service Designer in a hospital, I functioned a lot like an in-house consultant to the organisation of over 9000 staff. Part of my responsibility at work was to build a more robust design culture and practice within the organisation.

I knew that getting stakeholders’ buy-in to design approaches would require change management. For this, I turned to a tool I was most familiar with — the Prosci ADKAR model — a popular model used by change managers that takes you step-by-step through managing natural human resistance to change, and the building blocks required for successful behaviour change.

The 5 stages are:

The five parts of the Prosci ADKAR Model show the milestones an individual or organisation must reach for a change to be successful. Each of the milestones would have to be met before moving on to the next. I used this model to get a sense-check on where we were as an organisation in the change journey so that I would know where to start, and how to intervene.

Keeping my ear to the ground

After engaging key stakeholders in a series of one-to-one sessions and workshops, I knew that the organisation leadership was already seeking new ways for the healthcare system to innovate, and pushing for projects to have a stronger focus on patient’s needs.

I wanted to get a sense of whether this sentiment was echoed on the ground, so I inserted myself into communities around the hospital understand what people were thinking and feeling about this.

User research is essential in uncovering the who, what, and whys behind problems, and while it was still in its growing stages in the hospital, people knew of it.

Through these interactions and observations with different stakeholders, people were already showing the Awareness and some Desire for change. Knowing that I knew that the next milestone in the horizon was having the Knowledge on how to do it.

Identifying the gap — Where is knowledge lacking?

The Knowledge milestone represents the information, training and education necessary to know how to practice the new way of doing things.

The design approach places emphasis on discovering the right problem to solve, not just the first problem we notice. It requires that we invest time in both problem-finding and problem-solving. What I noticed was that where stakeholders struggled the most was in the problem-finding stage. User research still seemed to be a nebulous design activity to many stakeholders, and what happened between the Discover and Develop stages of the double diamond was a black box to many people.

And so I saw an opportunity to intervene and support stakeholders in their desire to understand their users better. Thus my mission to begin teaching User Research in the hospital began!

🧠 Borrowing change management tactics for Knowledge building

When people have the Awareness of the need for change and the Desire to support a change, Knowledge is the next building block. To do this, I borrowed 2 key tactics for knowledge building from the change management handbook:

Establish effective Training and Education programmes, and build Job Aids

Having properly designed and delivered training programmes are an essential channel for building knowledge in most changes.

When starting any project it’s always important to know your audience. Most stakeholders whom I would conduct these training programmes to would be anyone from medical doctors, nurses, therapists to hospital administrators. The most left-brained people in the room really.

With this in mind, I made sure to tailor my approach to best suit my target audience of logic-driven, detail and fact-oriented individuals.

📖 I started by defining everything

I made no assumptions, explained the basics and clarified every term.

In my workshops I always began by defining the “why” of each step and each tool, to align the different floating definitions and understandings and elucidate the rationale behind everything we were doing. While doing this I remembered not to overlook the “how” as well, because understanding application was important too.

Explaining why we do user research, and how the process works

What insights are and how they fit in a typical workflow

I also broke down the popular tools and models. Here, I found it helpful to show a direct comparison between similar tools to highlight their main differences and benefits!

When and why to use different models and maps

✏️ Next, I introduced structure and frameworks

I knew my audience needed a proper order to begin. For them, I knew they worked best with having a framework and structure. While I created guides and templates to steer them in the right direction, I always made sure to explain the rationale behind the steps so they understood the PRINCIPLES behind them. This helped to ease them into the user research process and out of their initial rigidity.

Template to define Research Scope and guiding questions for Stakeholder Interviews

A simple structure to begin building questions for an interview Discussion Guide

Identifying behavioural variables for Persona creation by using the AAAMS tool as a guide

📍 Then, I made sure to contextualise my examples

When sharing about different tools and terms, a question that was asked continuously was “When do we use that? Could you share an example?”. I realised that people learn best through examples. Examples help make theories and principles more tangible to them.

What I also learnt was that examples that were contextualised to them helped them to understand these tools even better because they could relate to them. However, there were not many examples of design tools and steps in user research processes that were contextualised specifically to healthcare. So I hunted around for problems and examples I could make out of them.

Example of a common problem and scenario, and where How Might We questions come in

🎉 Also, I made it fun!

The format used for knowledge-transfer activities also influences how much information people retain. The highest retention in adults comes from having a hands-on application of learning to a real and immediate problem. So I always made sure my training programmes would include interactive activities and demonstrations with less focus on theory, and, me talking.

One challenge I faced in conducting these training sessions is that many of the times it had to be online, because of certain logistical issues with having all participants together. So I had the added challenge of engaging these groups of stakeholders virtually.

Using Mural to facilitate interactive activities during the training sessions

I held my training sessions on Mural so that they could interact with certain features on the screen. To make it more immersive, I introduced a narrative at the beginning of each training session and a story of a problem they would work on through the session.

I also introduced characters and “stakeholders” they would meet along the way and interspersed many hands-on activities throughout the training sessions. I used this as a means of giving my participants an opportunity to immediately apply the lessons they learned and reinforce learning.

I made sure the problems we worked through during training were ones that everyone was familiar with

Games and interactive activities along with each training session

✅ Finally, I created job aids for them to evaluate their own work

Having a set of accessible notes and practical tools helps people remember and practice this new knowledge long after they complete training. Examples of job aids that serve as knowledge-building resources include checklists, templates and online resource files. These help to reinforce learning on the job and empower people to take on user research projects on their own.

Commonly, as people embarked on their own projects, they would approach me to ask, “How do I know if this is a good How Might We statement?”

So I created job aids that took the form of evaluation checklists/tools for them to check their own work. This helped to build their confidence and helped to be self-reliant.

Checklists for evaluating a How Might We question

Reflection

In total, I conducted training to over 50 stakeholders in the hospital, along with one-to-one coaching sessions whenever needed.

For both human and systems-level challenges, identifying the right problems to solve is key in moving away from incremental improvements to making creating meaningful change. This was why I saw the need for a stronger practice of user research in the organisation.

Teaching others the basics of user research not only challenged my own understanding, but also presented me with a great chance to hone my presentation and communication skills. Applying these change management tactics also helped me greatly in planning change management activities and supporting people throughout the change. However, Knowledge-building is only effective when individuals have the Awareness of the need for change and Desire to change. If stakeholders are not ready to learn or are only participating in training because their supervisor required attendance, they will not connect with and retain the learning. Therefore it is important to assess the current state of the organisation and stakeholders before planning interventions.

Thanks for reading!

I hope this was useful to you and if you have any thoughts about the project or have any feedback to share, I’d love to hear from you at shainaatan@gmail.com.