First week — a new Challenge: A wicked problem to solve
Failure is not the opposite of success but a part of it
The week Ironhack started with a full schedule from nine in the morning to six in the afternoon. Right after getting to „know“ each other, we had to accomplish our first challenge: get together in a team, use the learnings from the lessons you will receive during the week and by the way resolve a wicked problem.
The team
Four students from our remote classroom, randomly chosen and never seen before would have to put aside all concerns and inhibitions to deliver a presentation in one week.
The task
Especially in the last year we all experienced that technologies changes the way to interact with each other. In many cases this meant improvements, but if it was not for the pandemic that impact on our lives could be bigger.
As the public system constitutes technologies solutions to big infrastructures, we, as the citizens should to have part at this change too.
How might we improve on that experience to have an issue that needs to get medical attention.
Our task was to look into public hospitals. But when we tried to concretise on our task, it quickly turned out that the European system is very different from the medical care in the United States. For the fact that we are an international team but all from the Europe, we decided to focus on local general practioners, who would mainly be the first contact in the case of a medical issue.
In order to find the main pain point and provide an user centred solution approach by end of the week, our team would follow the 5 steps of the design thinking process.
1. Empathise
To get a deep understanding of the problem we have to solve. We started our user research by questioning potential patients. First we run a short survey of 10 question regarding habits and actual experiences of making use of medical care. We decided to set the an age limit on 18 to focus on people with the capability to make their own medical decisions and the technological standard to organise their medical care online. Later on we would have also reuse the questions to build the framework of our interviews partner.
The feedback from our surveys was quickly high enough as the outcome was really surprising for us.
60 % of our participants would make an appointment with their doctor via phone! Especially learning that the most of our respondent in fact 65.7 % were between 25 and 35 years old, we were assuming that it would be more natural for this group to book appointments online.
More detailed insights came as hoped from our five interviewees. Theirs answers backed the results from our survey and in addition to that we got another valuable insight from the interviews. There were at least two people who wouldn’t make an appointment at all and rather put up with long waiting times to go to an open consultation hours. first comes, first serves but how frustrating you are not first.
This was unexpected and looked a little strange at first.
Reorganized in a Affinity Diagramm these interview statements and the survey data began to link up and we were able to filter out some repeating pain points.
- Not all the doctors are available online
- Cancelling / rescheduling is not easy
- Lack of (properly) working online environment
- Language barrier at the counter (English should also be available everywhere)
All these information helped us to step into the shoes of our user and empathise with him/her. Who do we have to empathise with?
The goal of the person is to get medical attention. In order to get that, the person needs to decide on an doctor appointment that suits him/her well. The person tries to avoid this process based on his/hers experiences that there are several pain points including overcrowded practices, long waiting times, lack of availability or information.
2. Define
Knowing all these details we could go on to define that one problem statement that would be the basis for our solution approach.
With our learnings from the first phase we created „Anna“ our user persona, Age 29. She is single, she comes from Germany and works as an Art director in a gallery in Amsterdam. Because of her international working environment she is speaking English most of the time, so her Dutch has not improved yet. Even if she does not get sick often, the time it takes to making an appointment is crucial for her and she experienced a language barrier at the front desk of a medical practice once. When talking to her friends or coworkers she would probably say something like:
“I am looking for an online app that will simplify the access to my medical practice”
Looking into „Anna’s“ user journey led us finally to our Problem Statement:
(Potential) patients need quick access to make or modify an appointment with a doctor and to receive health-related information online, because they are currently postponing or avoiding to see the doctor, are dealing with long waiting times, a language barrier and a lack of direct feedback.
Getting in touch with our user by providing an app that summons all the informations they need and leads into the direct action to book the wished for appointment.
3. Ideate
Following our road map, we finally got to the point where we could brainstorm, make assumptions, be creative and hopefully offer a solution that would alleviate some of our users’ problems.
We evaluated the ideas by voting and decided on the feature of our app that we wanted to test first:
The user should have quick access to his doctor’s schedule in order to book an appointment with just a few clicks.
A few lo-fi sketches were quickly created but we had also to weigh up which functions were necessary to test an idealised user flow and which ones served our own needs to offer a “complete” solution. I think one of our most important learning so far.
4. Prototype
By end of the week we managed to create our idea of a first prototype of what we thought would be the ideal process to get an appointment and we even got to test the the user flow.
Assuming that “Anna” our user persona already has subscribed in our app:
1. she has to sign in
2. push the button “Book an appointment”
3. chooses the doctor she likes the most
4. decides which appointment suit best
5. optional she can specify her issue and confirm the appointment
6. gets an instant confirmation
5. Test
The test result shows that we probably overdid it with the options offered. Fortunately, only a few test persons quit the test prematurely, but the percentage of those with invalid clicks is still clearly too high at 46%.
Next steps
- More precise evaluation and if possible interviews must follow in order to improve the app functions and to make it more user-friendly.
- Reduction of the really essential features for the one path the user has to test.
Keylearnings
- the more time we can put into user research the better the outcome will be.
- surveys get you the numbers, but interviews get you valuable insights to empathise.
- teamwork is essential to over and over iterate what we are thinking is the best way to resolve the problem.
- test as soon as possible to not run in the wrong direction.
- you are not your user.
- design thinking is no linear process.
Before I close my article I have to thank my great teammates Anaïs, Annemjin, Dagija for making this week such a great experience.
Thank you for reading, your feedback is appreciated.
