Week Seven Findings

October 19–25

Debrief of Mid-Semester Presentation

After our mid-semester presentation on Monday, we received critiques from Professor Eric and the UPMC product team. We were so happy to get positive feedback: the UPMC representative agreed that we are solving an important problem space by focusing on volunteers and creating a community for them. She also mentioned that we could look into how we could get people outside of the medical field to recognize volunteers, as our app so far is just trying to create support from the inside, rather than both inside and outside.

The main constructive feedback we received was that we did not include enough patient research, since our interviews were of student volunteers, doctors, and a volunteer coordinator. Therefore, we will focus on talking to more patients in UPMC. Eric mentioned that we should look into focusing on patients who are BLV in particular, since that could be a really rich space, as we could provide volunteer training on how best to help and interact with BLV individuals.

Next Steps

Our next steps are focused on reaching out to and interviewing patients. While we’re currently trying to interview patients who have spent time at UPMC and have interacted with that system specifically, we will also pivot our search of patients to individuals who are blind or have low vision, to figure out what their needs are and how to best help them.

In order to talk to people who have gone to UPMC, Cindy put up a flyer on her apartment board:

For our next steps, we’re also working on questions, and probes to facilitate the interviews.