Dignity in Healthcare
User Research | UI/UX | A/B Testing
October 2022-May 2023
Team:
Dr. Miso Kim, Professor of Experience Design
Deirdre Ni Chonaill, Project Lead
Sunny Cheng, Project Manager
Sohee Kang, Designer
Adeline Park, Designer
Background:
Researching and listening to the heart-rending stories of family, friends, patients, and healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the huge suffering individuals experienced. In response, we set out to create a repository of possible dignity interventions in the design of services and products in healthcare settings — everywhere from the ICU to home care.
Fall 2022 Timeline
Review research findings and develop categories based on codes
Create a limited number of storyboards to visualize scenarios from our research where dignity was at issue
SEP 2022
Develop a framework for a website to host proposed content and consider ways to present these ideas in an easy and digestible way through wireframes
Create a rough prototype to flesh out our initial ideas and validate whether it is a good approach
OCT 2022
Create a testing plan, interview scripts
Advertise for volunteers to test our prototype on and schedule tests
Run and record user tests
NOV 2022
Gather learnings and key takeaways from test
Iterate our website prototype referring learnings from tests
DEC 2022
Testing
Type: in-person user testing
Participants: 9 Users (Ages 22-65)
7 graduate students at Northeastern
2 working professionals
Period: Nov. 8-22, 2022
Duration: 35-50 mins
Lo-fi Wireframes for User Testing
Card Sorting Activity
Scenario Activity
A/B Testing
Key Takeaways
Dignity is a tough subject to broach as it is so ingrained into the fabric of everyday life. Asking people to reminisce about times in their lives garnered mixed results in terms of stories but probably helped get them in the right frame of mind.
Card sorting proved to be an interesting exercise that exposed different ideas about how people interpreted the groups of words.
Asking people to review an interface and say their thoughts out loud requires a certain level of self-awareness. Some subjects had difficulty with this task as they focused on the interface.
Asking people to imagine themselves in scenarios where they don’t really have experience or much of a sense of context they can relate to was a bit challenging overall.
Overall most subjects preferred the pop-up results page on the A/B test over being sent to another page as it created less visual dissonance.
By the end of the interview, most subjects thought the website was an interesting idea and were curious to see how it would develop. One comment was that it would be helpful to define dignity at the top of the home page. (separate page for various meanings of dignity)
Some participants were confused about the scenario given as an experience designer and how the website was specifically designed for experience designers to use. Many participants automatically took on the role of a healthcare worker or patient when interacting with the website.
Most of the participants were less experienced (< 1 year) designers, so they found it hard to imagine themselves as the designer in the scenario.
They need more visual aid to browse the website and ideas
Next Steps
Iterate our website wireframe reflecting test results
Create concrete, specific content so that our audience can understand the value of this project.
Create content for tools:
- Work on more scenarios from our initial interviews.
- Review dignity interventions already gathered and expand until we have a comprehensive list.
- Reach out to individuals working in the healthcare industry and ask them about the kinds of dignity interventions they know about or instinctively use.- Sort information and see if it aligns with our initial approach.
Build a new prototype to test the approach again.