Project Summary

Company Overview

Stryker is one of the world’s leading medical technology companies that aims to make healthcare better by helping caregivers perform their jobs more efficiently in order to enhance patient care. They collaborated with UE Group, a Silicon Valley based UX Design consultancy, and sponsored an experience studio project during the fall of 2019.

Role

I was a team member of a group of five students (two co-leads, three team members) and worked closely with the other team members and co-leads. I was responsible for researching existing solutions and understand the emotions experienced by family members and patients, creating a user journey and detailed experience map, conducting interviews, creating low and hi-fidelity wireframes on Figma, and designing UI elements for the mobile app. We often had to communicate with our sponsors, Matt Giffels (Principle UX/UI Designer and Stryker) and Annie Pugliese (Senior UX Designer at UE Group) via WebX calls. During these sponsor meetings, I would usually be tasked to take meeting minutes as well as had to co-lead one of the meetings. In addition, another team member and I were in charge of our project’s documentation and had to create to-do lists of what each team member had to complete by the end of each week.

Project Overview

Family and friends have long waits at hospitals during surgical procedures [and often] experience elevated levels of anxiety and boredom. Increasingly, surgical devices are computerized and networked. This ushers in the possibility of providing updates from the surgical suite, either automatically or manually, that may reduce the anxiety of those waiting.

Problem Statement

Increase transparency throughout the duration of surgery for family and friends in order to decrease anxiety levels.

Note: * Focus on planned surgery (something that has been scheduled in advance) * No negative updates will be provided via the app * Focusing on group member side of mobile app, not the patient's side

Project Timeline

Research

We chose literature review as a method to find solutions and research that already exists on our project scope. The goal of our literature review was to gain a better understanding of of the hospital waiting room experience.

Here are some of the key takeaways from research:

• The current existing solutions that are available in the market are Electronic Access to Surgical Event (EASE app), My Care Text, Vital Link @ Memorial Medical Center

• HIPPA assures individuals health information is carefully protected. This was something that we kept at the back of out minds while designing.

• Anxiety originates from uncertainty, which makes waiting time seem longer. However we wanted to better understand what level of updates they preferred: simple or detailed, and how that would impact our design.

• Anxiety is a common emotion experienced by those in the waiting room. They often try to distract themselves with phones/TV and they find different ways to educate themselves through sources such as webMD to better understand the surgical procedure as well as the staff members involved.

Journey Map

I created a journey map based on the insights found through research as well as out first round of affinity diagramming. The goal of the journey map was to better understand the levels of anxiety experienced by patients and group members (family and friends) throughout the process.

Here are the key takeaways from the journey map:

• Group members experience high levels of anxiety right before, during, and right after the surgery

• Patients on the other hand experience high levels of anxiety when they are being prepped for surgery (pre-op) and while being wheeled into the operating room.

Interviews

We chose interviews as a method to find insights into questions that couldn't be answered through secondary research like how people would want to be updated via technology and how a staff members would describe the various stages of surgery to a group member.

Here are the key takeaways from our interviews that impacted our designs:

Experience Map

After creating a journey map and conducting user research, we decided on using an experience map as a tool to help us identify touch points needed in the app. Although the map below doesn’t look quite like an experience map it was created with insights from our journey map that showed where anxiety for both family and group members was the most high. I created this digitized version of the experience map based on the rough sketch created by our team.

Here is an analysis of the experience map:

• There were six stages of surgery which translated into five different stages of the app

• It’s important to note that this was made during the early phases of the project so app stages are not pages of the app. Instead, they served to inform us on what high level designs would need to be included.

• Below each section within ‘Stages of App’ are touch points we decided would be necessary based off research conducted thus far. 

Ideation & Testing

Low-Mid fidelity Prototypes

We did a lot of sketching and ideation throughout the course of these 15 weeks. Below are some of the sketches that I created that influenced our designs. Once these low-mid fidelity prototypes were created, we decided to test them using usability testing in order to identify points of confusion or incongruence within the app.

Hi-Fidelity Interactive Prototype

Below is the final hi-fidelity interactive prototype created based off our various iterations of designs, sponsor and class feedback. Our goal with this app was to provide those waiting remotely or in the waiting room, information about each stage of the surgery as well as updates every 30 minutes or hour (depending on the settings) on the status of the surgery to help relieve their anxiety. This final iteration of our mobile app concept was created by my team member, Juliet. This is an interactive prototype so feel free to click through!

A Moment of Reflection…

This was my second experience studio project and I cannot emphasize enough how much I have learnt from the wonderful people that I had the privilege to work with. This project would not have been possible without my amazing team (you can see our appearance on the Purdue Polytechnic Newspaper below). I would also like to thank our sponsors Matt and Annie for their consistent guidance and feedback. We all really enjoyed the project and problem space and we look forward to hopefully collaborating with you in the future!

Team Stryker (Left to Right): Eleanor Hamilton (Team member), Simran Bansal (Co-lead), me (Team member), Juliet Jimenez (Team member), and Madi Lindeman(Co-lead).

Thank you :)