Ameliorate patient-volunteer interaction with design changes

Understand the human behavior via contextual inquiries and shadowing; find insight and design for a change.

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Initial Team: Mingli Lee, Puhe Liang, Yasemin Karbassian, Ben Henig

Remake: Mingli

The Gift of Art program provides art posts for patients in the hospital.

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To understand how the program works and how people involved feel about it, we shadowed program members during their shifts in the hospital, observed their workflow, artifacts, the workspace and interviewed 12 people: 1 Manager, 1 Assistant, 3 Volunteers, and 7 patients.

We want to know:

Is there anything we can do to make all stakeholders benefit more from the program?

After the inquiries, we collected the notes and quotes and used the following methods to analyze the information: affinity mapping, artifact & environment modeling, and user journey map.

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The main responsibility of the volunteers in the program is to visit patient rooms, introduce the program to patients and provide the option of changing/choosing the art post on the wall. After years of experience running the program, the managers found out that what cheered patients up the most isn't the art posts they provided but the opportunity to talk to someone during their stay in the hospital.

Thus, they've decided to prioritize the quality of interaction between patients and volunteers over the number of visits and art posts exchanged. However, we found that...

Finding A1:

Volunteers did not follow the program's policy of “quality of interaction over quantity” in their shifts.

Why?

After reviewing the information and quotes we collected, we found 2 potential causes: the design of the shift sheet and the constraints of the communication within the program.

How could the design of the shift sheet affect volunteers' behavior?

Let's look at it closely. We found that the shift sheet is designed to be separated by floors, and each of the floors is assigned to a single volunteer during one shift.

To prevent volunteers from prioritizing finishing the visit of the floors over meaningful interaction with patients, we suggested the design of separating the shift summary and the record of room/floor visits.

We also suggested solutions for the second possible cause:

make use of the future digital management platform as a common communication board for the program to easily reach all members and share the common ground.

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Finding A2:

A lack of an effective promotion method to reach all incoming patients from the program.

Facts:

• The patient beds' turnover rate is around 3 days on average.

• The distribution of patients' manual and the SOP for new coming patients are not consistent between floors in the hospital.

• On that basis, many patients didn’t know about the service of the art posts throughout their stay.

Listing down possible channels and artifacts, we try to find the most universal and convenient way to inform all incoming patients of the program/service.

An idea jumped to our mind:

Why not make use of the surrounding physical environment (the patient rooms) that's always there?

Thus, we came up with the recommended solution.

Here's the idea: place stickers by the side of the art posters in patient's rooms.

• Patients in the room have limited access to the internet and limited things to watch/see around them. A small sticker might not catch their attention immediately, but if they're interested in the art posters hanging on the wall, they're likely to notice it.

• This is a non-intrusive, simple, easy, low-cost and once and for all solution.

• Once the stickers are installed, they will always be there in the room. No electricity, no order of prints, and no human labor is needed when new patients come and leave.

At the end of the project, we presented the research findings and design suggestions to the program managers. If given the chance, we'd love to carry out the design ideas and see how it goes!