Spring 2023

UX Bachelor

Inform  about doctor   appointments (IDA)

Making hospital visits child-friendly through preparation and learning.

Navigating the pediatric healthcare system presents unique challenges, particularly in ensuring clear and effective communication between children, parents, and healthcare professionals.

Many children experience anxiety due to a lack of understanding about medical procedures, which can make it difficult for them to engage in their own healthcare journey. Likewise, parents often find it challenging to provide their children the right support before, during, and after a doctor's visit, further complicating the experience for both child and caregiver.

Goals

  • Design an engaging, child-friendly solution to help children better understand and prepare for their hospital visits.

  • Improve communication between children, parents, and healthcare professionals, ensuring a smoother hospital experience.

  • Develop interactive and intuitive features that maintain engagement and reduce stress throughout the hospital visit.

Purpose

The IDA application empowers pediatric patients by fostering active participation in their healthcare journey. Since children are typically accompanied by an adult, the app also provides structured, accessible medical history insights for parents. This ensures a transparent and informative hospital experience for both children and their guardians.

This bachelor project ran from January to May 2023 and had an interdisciplinary team consisting of two interaction designers and one production and product developer. Our chosen approach ensured the project met academic requirements for both degrees while effectively addressing the complexities of pediatric healthcare.

Personas

Project structure

Phase 1: Discover

To ensure ethical research practices, we adhered to NSD (Norwegian Centre for Research Data) guidelines, securing proper approvals for handling sensitive data.

Desk Research

  • Existing health-tech solutions primarily cater to medical professionals or adult patients, leaving a gap for child-friendly tools.

  • We identified common struggles faced by children and parents during medical visits, such as anxiety, lack of preparation, and communication gaps.

  • We analyzed hospital systems used by doctors and nurses to ensure seamless integration of our solution.

Interviews with Healthcare Professionals and Parents

  • We conducted qualitative interviews with doctors, nurses, and parents to understand their perspectives.

  • Parents significantly influence how children perceive and handle hospital visits, highlighting the need for a solution that includes them.

  • Children were involved in the testing phase to ensure the app was engaging and suitable for their needs.

Phase 2: Define

We focused on extracting key insights from our research using two primary methods:

Affinity Mapping

  • Synthesized interview findings into key themes: Building Empathy, Effects of Hospital Visits, and Target Group Conflicts.

Experience Mapping

  • Created two case studies to visualize different hospital experiences, identifying pain points and stressors in the patient journey.

  • The most significant challenges occurred when receiving information and during doctor-patient conversations.

  • The solution evolved into a communication assistant and structured agenda overview for each visit.

Phase 3: Design

Our design solutions focused on reducing stress for children and parents while promoting child participation in healthcare discussions.

Key Features:

Pain Scale: This tool allows children to express their physical pain using a 1-10 scale and a drawing board for further explanation. Designed to minimize reading and writing, it's suitable for most kids aged 5-8 years.

Procedure Explanations: By providing our target audience with explanations about various procedures and activities in hospitals, we can reduce stress caused by uncertainty.

Parent Information Hub: Parents will be provided with a summary of their children's past hospital visits and results from the pain scale test, enabling them to monitor their children's progress over time.

Mascot Companion: A friendly, animated character designed to make hospital visits feel less intimidating. Inspired by engaging educational mascots like Bjørnis.

Interactive Games: In frightening circumstances, children typically seek diversion and reassurance. Given our team's lack of experience in game design, we decided to create a small drawing board, maintaining our gender-neutral design approach.

  • Sitemap

  • Wirerame

  • Digitized wireframe

  • Low-Fidelity prototype

  • High-Fidelity Prototype

  • current design

Phase 4: Deliver

At this point, we asked kids to tell us what they thought about our solution. Watching them use the app and listening to their ideas helped us make little changes that improved the design.

WCAG 2.1 and Colour Theory

Our design falls under the health tech category, so we must comply with certain Universal Design (UU) standards. To achieve this, we created a design that exceeded the color contrast and text readability criteria for Grade AA and, in certain areas, even Grade AAA.

Reflection

IDA marked my first deep dive into health-tech design, offering invaluable insights into pediatric healthcare challenges. Observing the dedication of healthcare professionals underscored the importance of creating tools that complement their expertise while making hospital visits less daunting for children.

I believe we successfully met our goal of inclusiveness and demystifying the hospital experience for both children and parents. Through this project, we demonstrated that digital solutions can significantly enhance the way young patients engage with their healthcare.

A special note:

Throughout the project i have been able to gather an abundance of experiences that a school bench can’t provide with. Such as:

Interdisciplinary team - The communication and acknowledging the interdisciplinary values needed to come into focus early in the project. A strict contract and project strategy was set. Additionally, using the KANBAN method to do constant checks in each phase.

Location - We needed to save time and travel because our team was spread out. Each member was two hours apart, so we used digital meetings for quick checks and met in person at the university for larger planning and workshops.

Gathering insight from children - Children aged 5-8 years represent a challenging target group for several reasons, including their varying stages of communication skills, fluctuating levels of interest and focus, diverse experiences, and the strict privacy protections in place. To ensure a secure foundation for insight methods, we sought permission from the Norwegian Police and established contracts with the guardians.

Understanding that young children may struggle to maintain focus during extended interviews, we designed our conversations to be brief and rooted in their personal experiences. To facilitate engagement and make the process more relatable for them, we incorporated role-playing elements, such as playing doctor, which ultimately enhanced their participation and made the testing of the prototype more effective.