Now that we’re deep in the design phase of this project, storyboarding is becoming incredibly helpful. Not only does it help us build empathy for different groups of patients suffering an illness, but it also identifies the different pain points and opportunities in peoples’ experiences. It’s amazing what simple sketching can do to uncover things you hadn’t thought of. We’ve been sketching everyone from ‘stoic men’ who have a tendency to avoid self-care, all the way to our ‘worried well’ who need that extra reassurance. With the extensive medical terminology, diagnosis and treatment information we’re gathering along the way we’re considering ourselves quite the medical experts in the world of design right now.
Throughout designing we wanted to be mindful of the barriers to self-care. The main ones include:
- Anxiety and belief that the severity and duration are beyond normal
- Past experiences of prescription for minor ailments deemed confirmation of the need for medical intervention in any future illness
- Lack of sufficient knowledge and skills to implement self-care
- Lack of attention to self-care
To do this we flipped the various barriers into opportunities, framed as 'How Might We' statements. In essence we stepped down a level into more granular framing of the problem. You can read more about 'How Might We’s' in one of our blogs here.
We began ideation at a high level, imagining different self-care structures, via design studios that we shared with you in our previous blog. With our focus on the exciting opportunity to empower people to “self-prescribe” and access more personalised self-care advice we diverged our imagination again – how could we best design for that? With the backdrop of storyboards showing us where points of intervention were needed we sketched, and sketched some more. As we were sketching, we focused on the users’ needs in each square of the storyboard and came up with solutions to address those needs. Some of these were larger concepts, others appeared to be features, but it gave us a lot to work with.
We seemed to be aligned in what ideas should be set aside for now. At this point we started to see the connection between the more compelling ‘mini-ideas’ and the formation of a user journey that addresses a range of problems and opportunities for our different personas. Fleshing this out on Post-its meant we could easily shift things around or cut what we later felt was unnecessary. As always, we sourced feedback from Clearlefties, this time to ‘sense-check’ the wider service as well as give a different eye to the detail. A conversation with one of our developers helped clarify technical constraints and options for delivery. As a result we decided that our concept will be in the form of a progressive web app.
Although we’re designing a digital solution, it has non-digital interfaces and integration that makes it somewhat service-like. We’re now guerilla testing the concept whilst considering the content and copy of the screens. Although good user experience always relies on an almost pedantic consideration of copy, designing in the health space perhaps depends on this even more. It means on top of the brand voice, clarity, instilling trust and other content considerations, we need language that reassures, and keeps people 100% safe. We’re enjoying the challenge!
You can follow us on twitter @clearleftintern for regular updates on the project.