UX Kitchen Covid19 Design Challenge: Team Ronabusters Case Study: Impact of COVID-19 on the Hearing Impaired

Over the month of April, the UX Kitchen community was engaged in a Design Challenge to find solutions for the social and economical problems emerging from the Covid19 pandemic. The challenge brought together a total of 95 participants from 11 countries to tackle 8 problem areas using UX and Service Design methods.

The UX Kitchen Covid19 Design Challenge took place over four sessions; Inspiration Phase, Ideation, Pitch Prep, and Pitch Day. The teams collaborated remotely and were given assistance through coaching by the UX Kitchen organising team when needed. The teams practiced their UX skills to come with novel solutions to important problems. An example was Team Ronabusters, who tackled the issue of the impact and challenges faced by vulnerable communities due to Covid19. They wrote the following case study of their process and outcome:

Designing to spread awareness and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the Hearing Impaired community

TEAM RONABUSTERS

As you probably guessed from the team name, Team RonaBusters consists of a group of three aspiring UX individuals with an aim to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on vulnerable communities. The team members are Lynne Ng’endo(Android Developer), Natasha Murji(UI/UX design student) and Hellen Kokach(Computer Science Student).

The whole process involved listing our stakeholders and carrying out secondary and primary research which then led to brainstorming ideas to come up with an effective solution.

Problem

The challenge we were working on was how to spread awareness and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the hearing impaired community.

Research conducted and findings

From our user research, we were able to map out the areas of major concern which were:

• Limited access to proper information concerning the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Communication barrier between doctors and hearing-impaired patients.

“Patient was restrained in the bed as he kept trying to get up. I quickly realized that he was trying to find his wife and because he was hearing impaired was not aware of our NO VISITOR policy,” says Miranda, a nurse from St. Mike’s hospital in Toronto, Canada during an interview.

We came up with a User Persona to better understand our user and their journey.

The User Persona was drawn on finding that the population in Kenya is quite young. With this knowledge, we knew that we wanted to focus on an age range between 15–29. We specifically wanted to highlight an older sibling as people with disabilities are often not empowered and feel that they have to be taken care of.

Solutions

As we entered the ideation phase we formulated two ‘How might we?” statements in regard to our problem statements:

• How might we improve access to proper information on COVID-19 to the hearing impaired through the media?
• How might we improve communication between medical doctors/nurses and patients who are hearing impaired?

This led to a brainstorming session among the team that resulted in various ideas for our solution.

A vote was carried out to determine the best ideas which were:

• A dedicated USSD number that can be used by the hearing impaired, especially those with no/limited internet access, where they can text for more information on COVID-19.
• A digital app that would translate sign language to speech thus providing real-time communication between patients and doctors.
• Designated masks that allow access to lip reading.
• Medic Alert Bracelet containing patient identifier information.

To determine the feasibility of the ideas, we went back and consulted some stakeholders, one of them being the director of surgical services, Mr. Nurrallah Rahim, at Aga Khan hospital, on their validity. From the conversations between the stakeholders, we decided to drop the last two ideas (designated masks and medical bracelets) since they were not feasible enough and the hospital sector in Kenya had limited resources. This led to us finalizing the most feasible solutions which were the digital app and the USSD application.

We incorporated the solutions into the user journey map as seen below:

In our journey map, we find that Mercy tends to have many pain points of frustration when not being able to access accurate information or has to rely on her family. When thinking about if she were to get sick, worries of being scarred elevate. With the drawn solutions for both offline and online cellphone access, we wanted to make it accessible to all Kenyans regardless of socio-economic and physical location.

In Mercy’s journey with the solutions, we find that the offline USSD hotline can be very helpful to gain the updates to changes rapidly compared to other media sources that may take time to update. This option really gives Mercy the empowerment to feel safe with better information attaining our statements that helped to conceive them.

Below are the solution ideas prototypes:

USSD Prototype — The impact of this solution is to provide daily updates of the COVID-19 thus ensuring access to accurate information.

Digital App Sign to Speech — This solution aims to convert sign language to speech and vice versa using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The impact is to make it a global communication tool not just for patients and doctors.

Reflections

The challenge was a huge learning experience for all of us. The whole experience just showed us how important Human Centred Design is when developing solutions. It is important to think from the user’s point of view and put ourselves in their shoes. Special thanks to the organizing committee for their guidance and support for without them we would not have made it this far.