My Role
I was part of the pitch team an responsible for the experience, strategy and design of the conversational experience. I led the UX work, produced all major design artefacts and presented these.
The challenge
How can we help the elderly to live a more self-determined life?
Being in Finland, we as team explored the public healthcare ecosystem focusing on understanding the functioning and problems being faced by the patients and professionals in the healthcare industry.
The user interviews and the data research highlighted the underlying issue of the health industry being under staffed. According to the research done there are more than 20 patients assigned per nurse.
The combination of a fixed deadline, problem identification, developing business plan, executing the right solution and usability testing meant I needed to get the experience right in the first four weeks.
The Approach
Focusing on User Need
We started with doing intensive research by conducting impromptu and scheduled interviews with patients in hospitals clinic waiting for their turn and also the nurses.
In the initial phase of the research the interviews, patients personal experience and observational study of the hospital environments emphasised mostly the problems in appointment booking system. The patients complained about having to wait long when seriously ill to get any treatment. Furthermore, the nurses faced the issue of being understaffed and overworked.
However, formulating a solution for the same was not an easy task because the user never felt the need to use an app for booking, they preferred the old system of calling and getting a confirmation by the nurses. Our intention was to tackle the underlying problem of demand and supply, but by only enhancing the booking system the aforementioned would not be addressed effectively.
To differentiate ourselves in an already mature and complex ecosystem, we needed to divert from focusing on the ecosystem as a hole to a particular user segment.
The Business Structure
It was important for us to even look at the problem and solution from the business and market point of view. Meeting with big, established and experienced players in the Finnish healthcare industry like IBM Watson and Apotti, an extensive change project of the social social services and healthcare field in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area helped us understanding the current complex and tightly coupled business model.
With their insights we identified risks, current structure, system and aligned on expectations and constructed a business model and vision for the solution. Following this, I crafted a experience strategy outlining our phased approach and direction for the conversational UI.
Business Model Canvas
The Discovery
Does ageing mean losing control? What does ‘care and safety’ in context to health mean?
Older people are a rapidly growing proportion of Finland ́s population. The increasing number of people needing healthcare services in its different forms is a major national challenge and requires healthcare improvements as well as new disease management models within all healthcare systems.
Currently, most of the elderly prefer living alone in the comfort of their homes. Every elderly has a nurse assigned to them who visits once in a day to check up on them and do the normal chores of giving medicines and providing any support if required in the limited time. The remaining time the elderly lives alone.
"Living alone for long duration is what concerns the close ones and also revealed an alarming issue among the elderly of loneliness."
We decided to focus on designing a buddy that tackled the issue of loneliness and also connected everyone needed into one system.
Also, from business perspective the aim was to decrease the number of home nurse visits. This would give nurses more time for the more challenging tasks with other patients.
The discovery phase was a quick, high-intensity effort that allowed us to define our project idea, review competitor landscape, understand the market landscape and begin refining the user needs, pain points and behaviour. We also kicked off a business landscape and technological discovery phase to understand the feasibility and constraints.
We created various value propositions of our user segments to understand their goals, benefits and pain points when interacting with the system.
"We used value propositions constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities and create empathy amongst the users."
The value proposition hypotheses consisted of four different archetypes we used to facilitate discussions about our user needs, desires and varying context of use.
The solution
Help elderly live a more self-determined and connected life.
While most elderly monitoring application are focused on fulfilling the need of the families and caregiver, Ilona is a smart AI health assistant that transforms your home into empathetic living being, While it is tracking health data, informing & supporting the user, it also connects and shares health data with experts and close ones and inform them incase of emergency.
It is a home buddy to chat with and it always keeps check on your movement, keeps you entertained and cared for, syncs with your smart wearable data, schedules medications and reminders, contacts emergency services and always keeps you motivated.
The Requirements
Designing for what users want to know, Do and Feel
Synthesising goals from our research served as a lens through which I could not only consider various scenarios, but also how they should feel. Thinking about emotional design early on helped us understand the importance of tone of voice to the experience.
Keeping the scenarios at a high level allowed me to work fluidly and explore concepts that we could easily communicate. They formed the backbone of our requirements, and allowed us to express these from a functional and emotional perspective.
Structuring the Experience
After identifying the main ‘plot-points’ in the scenario, I defined the primary pathways our persona would explore. It was necessary to think of all the possible pathways and design the system to be able to tactfully respond to each question. Also, I looked at the error handling response in the conversation UI context. It was important to understand and design the system keeping in mind the accent and bilingual language the user would sometime use when conversing.
I storyboarded my ideas to help design and communicate more complex flows. This was a huge time‐saver and allowed me to avoid edge cases.
Final Product
Introducing Ilona
An intelligent natural language speaking healthcare assistant, Ilona. Our assistant will be able to totally remove some of the simpler home visits by nurses. Thus giving nurses more time for the more challenging tasks with patients.