Client
AHA Center for Health Innovation | 2019
Role
Visual Designer
User Experience Designer
Goal
Create an engaging and hands-on day of activity for nearly 200 healthcare professionals
Rehabilitating Human-Centered Healthcare
overview
In a bid to redefine healthcare leadership, a national organization enlisted my team's expertise in creating an event to help cultivate innovation ahead of its annual leadership summit. As the visual and UX designer, I co-led the creation of a dynamic workshop where participants brainstormed solutions for common healthcare issues. Implementing user research and iterative testing, my role ensured a seamless blend of design and collaboration, driving impactful outcomes for the organization.
contributions
User Research
Prototyping
Usability Testing
the challenge
Confronting the intricate challenges of the American healthcare system, our client wanted the workshop to spur innovation and collaboration among emerging leaders. Participants represented a range of professions within the healthcare industry, all of whom had varied experience in human-centered design. As the visual designer, I developed engaging frameworks through which participants could easily collaborate. With just one day to execute the workshop, scalability and accessibility became pivotal considerations in crafting an immersive and impactful workshop experience.
user research
insights
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Prior to the workshop, few participants were familiar with human-centered design principles, though most stressed the need for patient-led solutions in the industry
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Workshop participants noted accessibility as a major challenge for patients, particularly those of underrepresented demographics.
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Participants hoped to leave the workshop with new connections and tangible next steps to implement new solutions within their communities
design summary
PREP: Analyzing results from our pre-event participant survey, my team identified 3 key needs for the event: approachable human-centered design thinking, rapid ideation, and focus on vulnerable populations. To execute this, we emphasized visual design to create a unique and engaging experience for participants. Instead of watching speakers onstage, they would spend their time working in groups to interact with our bespoke visual canvases. I prototyped canvas designs to focus participants on a single challenge at a time, enabling them to ideate solutions to said challenge and explore one solution thoroughly while using design-thinking principles. The canvases were six feet tall and served as mobile walls in the event space to separate the groups, encouraging engagement and promoting a playful environment as participants explored serious topics.
After several digital iterations of the canvases, it was time for usability testing. My team printed materials for two teams at scale and invited 10 volunteers from our client organization to test them in a mock-workshop. By conducting usability testing with a sample of our target audience, we identified several areas of opportunity to improve our materials and gained a greater understanding of how our participants would interact with them. In response, we added more playful illustrations to encourage interaction and personalization. We also finalized the four patient personas that would help to focus the ideation of each of the participant teams.
EXECUTION: When the time came to begin the workshop, participants self-selected into teams of five to seven and my team provided an overview of the day’s activities and expectations. Once the teams determined their patient persona, they explored and refined their solutions using their respective canvases. My team then shuffled participants into new groups to help identify the strongest ideas in the room while reducing bias. Participants voted on the best solution for each of the four patient personas. At the end of the workshop, we distributed a brief survey to collect feedback on the experience.
POST: Following the workshop, my team synthesized participant output and feedback into a post-event playbook for our client. The playbook highlights insights from event data and nearly 2000 ideas explored by participants. Most importantly, the playbook illustrates how to use the event’s bespoke design-thinking tools to tangibly improve patient outcomes, all while exploring the top-voted solutions uncovered at the event. Each program participant received a digital copy of the playbook.
impact
Nearly 200 emerging leaders in healthcare participated in this day-long workshop. Our post-event participant study found that, despite the long hours and fast pace of the event, participants felt highly engaged throughout the day and left with a deeper understanding of human-centered design. Many expressed an eagerness to implement similar design sprints among their own teams to tackle urgent problems.
“We hope that people walked away with a sense that there is so much opportunity for us to transform, and we can accelerate that transformation by working in new and different ways.”
Andy Shin, Chief Operating Officer, AHA Center for Health Innovation
