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Due to the current fragmented home health experience, adult caregivers need an effective cross-channel experience that would assist them with managing their elderly loved ones’ telemedical and personal wellness data. As my team designed this cross-channel experience, we focused on assisting adult caregivers who care for their elderly loved ones that live under the same household. We targeted this user group due to the difficult of managing personal time and caregiving.
Project Overview
Sponsor - UE Group + XCenter
My group worked with XCenter to design a cross-channel experience for adult caregivers. Throughout the span of the project, our team was able to consult XCenter for resources, wants, and needs. They provided us with a few resources that helped us gather interviewees and form our goals. We appreciated the time and energy they volunteered to our team's learning experience.
Targeted User Group
Our team focused on designing for adult caregivers who balance work with caring for their elderly loved ones who live in the same household.
Tools Used
- Figma
- Canva
Research Techniques
Design Challenge
XCenter challenged our team to design a consumer device that creates a single and consistent medical, health, and wellness experience. In order to design a single experience, our team was challenged to a central experience that expands to other mobile and display technologies.
- Competitive Analysis
- Co-Design Workshops
- Secondary Research
- Primary Research
Final Deliverables
- Design Documentation
- Interactive Prototype
- Product Video
- Research Report
Personal Contributions
as a team leader
Research
- Conducted & lead a competitive analysis
- Conducted interviews
- Conducted & delegated secondary research
- Lead and constructed Co-Design Workshop
*Competitive Analysis: research strategy to learn more about similar existing devices.
*Co-Design Workshop: a research strategy to learn, connect, and design with stakeholders
Communication
- Communicated with Sponsors
- Collaborated & lead teammates
- Communicated with Project Managers and Project Owners
- Interviewed with stakeholders
*Project Managers: professor of the studio class
*Project Owner: A person of resources for team leaders.
Mockup Design
- Created Video Final Deliverable
- Designed initial sketches
- Designed a few lo-fi screens
- Designed & assisted on finalized hi-fi screens.
- Added interactivity into the Figma prototype
- Designed cross-channel device screens
*Figma: design program
*Cross-Channel: a single device that connects other devices
Final Design
Video Deliverable
Prototype
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App designed for caregivers that can be accessed via smartphone, smart watch, and smart speaker.
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Complete with scheduling, task reminders, and the ability to be used by multiple caregivers of the same patient.
Click to see User Story
Our Process
Future Considerations
Final Design
Testing
Prototyping
Sketching
Research
Cross-Channel
Experience
Research
Participatory Design
To our sponsors request, our process for this project heavily revolved around participatory design.
We conducted 2 sessions in which we learned more about our participant's behaviors and designed alongside them. We used this research to create a user story to empathize with our audience and users.
*Participatory Design: An approach to design that invites all stakeholders into the design process
Considering that our team had little prior knowledge about caregivers, we decided to start our research with interviews.
User Research + Interviews
Basic research was completed in order to frame our interview protocol. This allowed us to interview a total of ten family caregivers.
Our team focused on three topics with the protocol:
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Routine
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Emotion Experience
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Currently used Resources
10
interviews
Takeaways
Daily Tasks as a Caregiver
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Check up on Loved Ones
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Prescription Refills
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Learning Protocols & Procedures
Emotional Struggles
"I felt that sometimes it was harder to care for my mother than a newborn child..."
In order to identify the most important aspects of the project, our team conducted a landscape alignment with the information we gained from the interviews.
Landscape Analysis
Goal: To identify high-value aspects of our problem space.
*Landscape Alignment: A method that identifies the least & most important aspects of a problem space.
Analyzed the current artifacts, people, and issues in the telemedical field and prioritized by which ones were high in time consumption and value.
Takeaways
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Considering caregiver's feelings + mental health (high in value, high in time)
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Making caregiving more time efficient (medium in value, medium in time)
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Researching current devices (high in value, low in time)
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Researching customization options for design (medium in value, medium in time)
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In order to asses the current experience with devices, our team highlighted these takeaways as high in value. This brought us to the next researching activity, a competitive analysis.
Competitive Analysis
Goal: Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of existing devices.
Conducted cognitive walkthroughs of several existing caregiver applications. With the features and research, we affinity
diagrammed.
Takeaways
From the competitive analysis, we identified features that aligned with our interview results.
Calendar
A way to see any task for the day such as taking medicine or scheduling an appointment.
Prioritizing Medication
Caregivers and patients need to locate information on the medicine they are taking.
Community
To allow for caregivers to share resources between each other.
Sharing Options
Option to update the others that care for the same patient. Minimizes the chance for repeated tasks being done.
Reminders
Notifications for daily tasks or to-do list.
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Medical Information
Access to the medical information from healthcare provider.
Due to our team's discovery of key features, we decided to begin ideating based on them.
Sketching
Initial Sketching
Conducted individual sketching based on takeaways from two rounds of interviews and the competitive analysis.
Community Board
Calendar Feature
Group Sketching
In order to create a journey for when our user would need the features sketched in Initial Sketching, our team collaborated and
discussed how this would be done based on our interviewees. Answering the question: "How would these features be
customizable for our users?"
User Journey for the onboarding process. (Including customization)
In order to test the journey we designed, we decided to move into prototyping.
Prototyping
Mid-Fis
*Medium fidelity prototypes are used to perform a proof of concept. These prototypes allow users to understand the design without having every design detail applied.
Our team used Whimsical, a prototyping program, to create mock-ups based on rapid sketching to showcase the features of a telehealth app, which address the current struggles of our user group.
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This was done in three sections. 1. Onboarding 2. General UI 3. Mental Health Screening
Onboarding
1. ​Onboarding helps accustom user for best experience
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2. Main features include customizable homepage, calendar, and community tab
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3. Health screening helps users maintain physical and mental health
General UI
Health Screening
Although our team had prototypes that we could test with, we realized that we needed a new perspective. Besides ourselves and our user, there were other UX Design students that would be able to take a look at the research we had, designs we created, and insert their design ideas.
Ideation Session
Goal: See new perspectives on problem space and user group​
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Informed workshop protocol in which we focused on:
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Understanding the lived experiences of our participants
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Evaluation of our mid-fis
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Reflection on pain points and opportunities
The ideation sessions brought a new perspective on how to structure our designs that would appeal more to our users and also for the time allotted for the project.
Testing
Mid-fi to Hi-fi + Co-Design Workshop
In order to test the our prototype with our users, we decided to convert them to hi-fi. More intuitive and an interactive prototype allows for non-design users to see the prototypes potential.
Co-Design
Our team created a workshop protocol and collaborated virtually with 2 family caregivers on a Miro workshop consisting of 4 activities around concept testing our mid-fis
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Takeaways:
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Medical screening was impractical
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Social media has been helpful in the past
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Medical information screens were disorganized
Based on these takeaways from the workshop, our team reevaluated our three prototype components.
Pivot Based on Co-Design Workshop
1. Changing our focus from a mental health screening to a community page.
Our participants explained that a health screening would be helpful but it would need to be more interactive. A survey tends to make people more stressed. Considering that our team had time constraints, we decided to transform the mental health screening into a community page. Their suggestion was to create a community page based on location. Caregivers have excessive stress when finding resources, and a community page would allow for more resources ultimately minimizing the stress.
2. Iterating on the Medical Info Screen
Our participants expressed the need for multiple doctors and the ability to search for specific medical information. Patients often go to multiple doctors and each one supplies them with different medical info. Considering this, our team decided to include both of these options.
After making these iterations, our team conducted usability testing with some other UX Designers.
Usability Testing
In order to test how seamless the Figma prototype was, we created a usability testing protocol and conducted testing with a few UX Designers.
Takeaways
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Content Overload
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Certain Text should be emphasized
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Calendar screen is color-busy
Our team ended up splitting up, one integrating the changes to the hi-fis and the other focusing on developing the cross-channel experience. The cross-channel experience is as follows.
Cross-Channel Experience
Purpose: Making caregiving an easier and less time-consuming job by giving them everything they need in one application
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Main Features:
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Voice command capability
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Reminders & updates on patient
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Synced to-do list & calendars
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Message and Notification center
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Experience demonstrated in final design video.
Home Speaker
Apple Watch
The home speaker interaction is explained in the final design video while the Apple Watch screens were designed in Figma. A/B testing was conducted on two versions of the watch screen.
A/B Testing
Goal: Discovering which design is more effective through participant consideration
The design on the right was preferred due to how it was less distracting and it fit the original design of Apple Watch notifications.
The home speaker interaction is explained in the final design video while the Apple Watch screens were designed in Figma. A/B testing was conducted on two versions of the watch screen.
Final Iterations
In correlation of our participants concern about completing tasks twice, we incorporated the cross-channel experience to notify each caregiver when a task has been completed.
With the iterations completed for both the application and the cross-channel experience, our design was at its final design.
Final Design
Design System
Along with the app design, we were also challenged to create a design system and a brand. With the time allotted, our team was unable to check for copyright and planned to do so if they project was taken to the next level.
Future Considerations
From the research we conducted, our team had some actions we would have taken if time had allotted.
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Apple Watch Design Guidelines
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Accessibility testing
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HIPAA Laws and regulations
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Copyright and trademark. search