Takeaways from 2 years of being a designer in Healthcare
✏️ A snapshot of my roles and what I learnt
I’ve always had an interest in designing for public good so when I graduated from university in 2019 with a Bachelors in Design Communications, I knew I wanted to join a team that would allow me to do that.
So when I got a shot at being a service designer in one of the largest hospitals in Singapore, I decided to take the leap! I’ve been a part of the team for about 2 years now, and in this time I’ve learnt so much, met so many new people and been given so many opportunities to push myself as a designer.
Growing a design culture
While I was hired as a service designer, being one of the first few designers to instil a more design-driven approach in the organisation meant I had to be sharp in various design skillsets. The hospital was still relatively new in adopting design and user-centric approaches and did not yet have a very robust design team.
My role in a nutshell: Designing and solving problems for the ones who need the change, but lack the toolkit to do so
So I was often in teams where I was the only designer. And this meant that I had to lead most design activities, doing a variety of work; design research, service mapping, testing, prototyping etc.
Here is an overview of the different roles I played:
- UX designer
- Design researcher
- Service designer
- Design facilitator
In my different roles, I faced unique challenges. This is what I learnt:
As a UX Designer…
I worked with a group of surgeons to develop an app for patients undergoing surgery. The nature of healthcare still remains largely paternalistic, so the surgeons were used to making recommendations and decisions for patients. And working on a project from a user-driven manner required a role reversal for them.
💪 Challenges — getting buy-in from non-believers
Before we even started the project, they already many ideas in mind for the app, some ideas they were quite adamant about. In my experience, I already knew that they were making some poor UX decisions in jumping ahead without talking to their users. However, they didn’t see the value of speaking to patients because they believed they already knew what was best for them.
💡 What I did
Instead of refuting or dismissing their ideas from the start, I prototyped it straight away and told the team we were going to let users test it. We came up with a set of tasks for them to complete and took the prototypes to the patients. I asked the team to note their observations and watch the user go through the tasks silently — without telling the patient what to do.
They saw first hand how patients were using the product saw pitfalls they initially never considered — e.g when patients keyed in their diet information, many left the text field for ‘calories’ blank. When we interviewed them to find out why, we learnt that they simply didn’t know what ‘calories’ meant. And when a patient finally exclaimed,
“AIYA! So difficult. I don’t use already la!”
They realised they needed to take a step back from pursuing their solution and began dedicating more time to understanding the needs and challenges patients faced — and letting this drive the product development instead.
As a Design Researcher…
I led research projects from managing recruitment and gathering user requirements and needs, to analysing and synthesising research data, communicating findings to stakeholders, and translating research into implementable outputs.
One project I worked was to help the hospital better understand patients undergoing rehab to increase compliance with rehab programmes by supporting these patients better to improve their rehab outcomes.
💪 Challenge — navigating sensitive health topics
While still early on in the research process, I realised that patients found it challenging to recall and express how they were feeling as they went through their rehab journey. Additionally, it was not easy for them to open up as some had not yet come to terms with their condition.
💡 What I did
I decided to pivot my approach. In order to ease patients into sharing their experiences, I created an activity for them to chart their journey and gave them stickers to indicate how they felt. This became a starting point for us to dig deeper into the conversation and uncover insights about their challenges.
A patient shared she was on a holiday with her husband and felt a throbbing headache. When it remained persistent, she decided to visit the hospital for a scan. It turned out to be a brain aneurysm and she was immediately sent for an emergency operation. She recalled how scared she felt during the incident and how she had to re-learn basic functions like walking after the operation, which was very traumatic for her.
We learnt that for patients like her, support didn’t come in just monetary subsidies but in learning that there was hope for her to recover and being able to see her progress as she went for rehab.
For more emotional interviews and stories like the one above, I dropped the activity completely so that I could focus on the patient and make them feel heard. I would then fill it up myself during the debrief sessions. When I presented my insights to the stakeholders to make recommendations, I focused on the stories of these patients, which helped stakeholders see the need for change.
As a Service Designer…
I planned, designed and facilitated workshops to derive Current State gaps/challenges and Future State design and solutions. One of the projects I worked was to improve the delivery of financial services in the hospital. This involved bringing together many stakeholders — from medical social workers, to business office managers, to financial counselling executives — who had little clue what each other was doing, together to streamline and improve the patient experience of financial services.
💪 Challenge — Managing different stakeholders
All of the stakeholders wanted their own process to be improved. But they couldn’t see how changing some of their processes would impact their staff on the ground or other departments. They were also at a loss about which part of their service was causing the low levels of patient satisfaction. This caused a lot of tension and anxiety between the team because they were overwhelmed by the work they needed to do and thought that improving the patient experience would mean taking up more work.
💡 What I did
I needed the stakeholders to know that I was here to help them too, so I extended my empathy beyond just speaking to patients and spoke to the different stakeholders too to better understand their concerns, needs and pain points. This helped me build trust with them and it helped me to map out all each department’s processes together, giving stakeholders a big picture of how their services were interconnected.
It also taught me how to maintain a focus while looking at both the bigger picture & the little details.
This helped break down the silos they worked in and showed the stakeholders that their needs were being considered too. It also helped them to be more empathetic to one another! After that, the stakeholders were more at ease and were able to communicate with each other more openly, which greatly helped the project.
As a Design Facilitator…
I led many co-creation and ideation workshops that gave non-designer stakeholders an opportunity to contribute to the design process.
💪 Challenge — building creative confidence
Many stakeholders lacked confidence in their ideas and were afraid to voice them out during workshops. Most did not want to share ideas that were too wild for fear of looking silly in front of their bosses or colleagues.
💡 What I did
Before a workshop, I would make it a point to speak to any team leads/bosses and task them to come up with something unexpected during ideation and get them to be the first to share their ideas after the round of silent brainstorming. This helped set the mood for the session and made everyone more at ease about sharing their ideas.
I also made sure to manage skeptics in the session that would immediately point out the flaws in certain ideas by setting ground rules and making clear divisions of the workshop phases; ideation (where we come up with ideas freely) and prioritisation (where we narrow down).
Overall takeaways
👯♀️ In summary, I learnt to be comfortable working with stakeholders from all levels and sharpened my communication skills and interpersonal skills, having to present my work not only to varying stakeholders but also to C-Suite executives.
📖 I also had to consistently find ways to improve myself because I was mostly working with non-designers. So I came up with some growth strategies to continuously improve and keep myself motivated. I did this by listening to podcasts, attending design seminars and connecting with other designers on LinkedIn.
🙌 And something I didn’t realise I would also have to do was to evangelise for the practice of UX. While the hospital leadership valued user experience, they were still in the growing stages of building a robust UX practice. That meant that I was constantly seeking to educate and influence stakeholders and project members on the value and purpose of UX. I would do this by conducting classes to educate colleagues on the design process.
Overall, this experience has stretched me as a designer and broadened my skillsets and I can’t wait for what’s next!
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.
