The problem we are exploring in this module is healthcare. Over the last 5 years especially the UK’s healthcare sector is falling apart. In this module we will look how we as designers can use our skills to improve the healthcare sector. Technology is becoming a very important asset to healthcare, so our jobs as designers is make it easy to use and functional.
HSCNI are using automated technology to improve the healthcare sector in Northern Ireland. This strategy is all about informing healthcare decisions using data which in turn will create better outcomes. Storing information in one place, so that better decisions can be made. Doing this breaks silos for healthcare workers andbrings everyone together, meaning a more seamless workflow within all the departments as they aren’t segregated. It also creates better communication lines from patients to healthcare workers.
As designers we may not always get a brief, but we have to come up with our own brief. The double diamond comes from the The Design Council, a way of displaying the design process. The brief can come after the discovery phase, and part of the define phase is deciding what the brief will be. This happens by using the themes and insights that we found from the research and discovery phase. For our project it is good to pick an area that we have family members or friends that are having issues, so that we can get more specific insight on the pain points, wants and needs of that specific area. Having too vast of an area to cover will lead to us getting overwhelmed and lost. It is important not to jump into building something that no-one wants or needs. This is why research is so important. After that comes develop, where we use our specific problem and come up with ideas that then leads onto deliver, where we prototype, test and analyse our product before handing it off. From the feedback we can keep going back to developing until we get the best design. This is called iterative design, where we keep making adjustments based off user testing. Doing this early means we can have a product that is usable and is wanted. There are other ways of articulating the design process, such as Human-Centered Design by IDEO, or Design Thinking Process by Design School Stanford.
UX is in between technology, user needs, and business needs. The technology must be suitable for the user that we are using, and the business must be able to develop/build it. The business is also a user, so we must be aligning our designs to both the end user and the business and what they want/need. We also wrote our own short definition of what is UX? Using only a sentence or two, we wrote down our ideas as to what UX is. We then used affinity mapping to sort all the definitions. My definition was “Making digital products easy to use and functional for a specific user”.
The main summary points that we got from everyones definition were:
We then noted down both a good and a bad user experience we have had. I noted down a good example being IKEA self checkouts, and a bad experience being the Burger King app. The reason why the IKEA self checkouts are a good user experience is because they allow you to scan your items yourself with your own gun scanner. This is really satisfying to do and alongside the clean UI it is overall a great experience. Since you do it all yourself it really makes it feel like the items belong to you now, as you get to go on the journey from warehouse to home with you. For the Burger King app, the reason why it was a bad user experience was because on the mobile app you could order your food, but no restaurants had this feature, so it was then useless. The app had a nice UI, great features but since it couldn’t order your food, then it failed at doing its job.
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
This law is crucial for UX design. Being innovative with designs is good, although if a user doesn’t know how to use it then it is no good. Using design standards and conventions that other products use is important as users will transfer these expectations over to your product. Users shouldn’t have to learn a new model each time they open an app, but instead the main functionality of the app should stay the same. A mental model is how the user thinks something works in their head, due to previous experience or how it works in real life. As designers we need to understand these so that we can play into them. An example of this is when we delete notifications, we swipe them away. This seems like we are actually throwing them off our phone screens when in fact this is a metaphor that is used, and this is because we have a mental model in our head as how deleting notifications happens by throwing them away.