UX Case Study: Helping health care workers access COVID-19 information

8 min readAug 24, 2020

Team: Malgorzata Hikawczuk, Maud de Boer, Snezhana Kuzmina

Duration of Project: 2 weeks

Overview

We have all heard the (very deserved) praise and public support for healthcare workers throughout the COVID-19 ciris. But have we been paying enough attention to the challenges, sacrifices and frustrations felt by the people on the front lines, saving our lives?

For this UX design project, we investigated the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers. In particular, we discovered that information overload was a significant pain point. Using our research data and a mid-fi prototype, we propose a Minimal Viable Product concept that helps healthcare workers access official hospital and medical information in a centralized and catalogued digital environment.

We used the the UX Double Diamond framework:

Healthcare workers under significant strain during the pandemic

Brief: How Might We support healthcare workers, improve their safety, or improve their access to medical supplies?

Due to media reports and our personal experiences, we went into the project with the assumption that mental health may be the biggest pain point experienced by healthcare workers. Using secondary research like newspaper articles, videos and online interviews, we constructed a survey and questionnaire to test this assumption and gather as much data about the healthcare workers experience as we could.

Area of focus: better and faster spread of information

Surprisingly, our survey showed that 57% cited “Better and faster spread of information” as their main pain point.

Other key findings from 116 survey respondents:

Uncertainty and fear of being infected (66,4%)
Lack of COVID-19 treatment guidelines (37,9%)
Lack clear instructions (48,3%)

Synthesizing all the data from our survey, and interview with 6 healthcare workers brought out a few key ideas:

Positive Distraction
Isolation from family
Fear over getting infected/infecting others
Improvement on receiving information

As findings in our interviews corroborated the data regarding information from our survey, we decided to follow this as our main path of investigation.

Quotes

“A lot of information was shared but you needed to know where to look”.

Users & Audience

Our primary research also informed our user persona. COVID-19 is a global problem, but it plays out in very different ways depending on location. We decided that for this project, we would keep the scope of the concept to a single national market. As 70% of respondents to our first survey were based in the States, this became the nationality of our user persona.

User Persona: Nurses in the United States

The primary persona we identified for this project was Alice, the adaptive nurse, working in the area where the number of infected patients was increasing extremely fast from one day to another. Listening to and looking out for her patients has always been the most important part of her role, but even more so in this current situation.

“Nursing is not just a job, it’s a vocation”

In the next step we interviewed a few extra people working in this industry to find out what their real problems are and how their workplace has been prepared for the pandemic. From my first observation I realized that nursing is not just a job, it’s a vocation. It’s not easy, and this is why we should be very proud of all nurses who provide great quality health care.

Alice, our persona feels frustrated at the overwhelming and constantly shifting information. Her main needs are to receive clear instructions and easier access to adequate medical resources, so she can focus on providing care to patients with COVID-19 who are in an acute or critical condition. As COVID-19 is a newly identified disease, effective vaccines and correct treatments are still in development. Working on hospital wards with this newly identified infectious disease, healthcare workers face a potential risk of infection as well as potential work-related anxiety that might cause mental health problems. This is why it is important to apply the latest knowledge to protect healthcare professionals and nursing staff who are caring for patients with COVID-19.

Define (Converge): Problem statement, opportunities

Second Survey: “hospital organizational information” causes the most frustration

Our research has given us enough guidance towards choosing “information” as the key problem area for our product.

However, before writing our problem statement, we felt that we needed further data to:

Understand what kind of information was causing the most frustration.
Set benchmarks for our hypothesis.

Second Survey key findings:

60% found hospital organization (e.g. staff deployment) caused the most frustration.
40% found PPE protocols caused the most frustration.
45% found instructions regarding COVID-19 caused the most frustration.

We also benchmarked the amount of time healthcare workers spent per day on looking up COVID-19 information.

Problem Statement

Our survey findings helped us write a clearly defined problem statement:

“Healthcare workers (from USA) need a way to receive clear COVID-19 instructions from their hospital, because they want to feel more certainty and be less overwhelmed by information.”

User Journey & Storyboard: opportunities largely occur on shift

Our second survey also provided valuable data for mapping out our user journey and spotting key opportunities.

When asked “At what part of the day do you mostly check up on COVID-19 informaion?”, 40% cited “during my working hours”, and a further 40% cited “after I finish work”. We accounted for a further opportunity during their breaks, with a decreasing trend throughout a 12-hour work shift due to exhaustion. On a more granular level, we created a journy map and storyboard to account for the exact opportunity when our product may become useful:

Brainstorming, Mind-mapping and Crazy 8s

MOSCOW Method:

Using the MOSCOW method we were able to clearly map our ideas into our “Must Haves”, “Should Haves”, “Could Haves”, and “Won’t Haves”. “Must Have” Features to be included in our Minimum Viable Products were:

Filtering options
Tags
Search bar
Space for research papers
Space for information from WHO and other medical bodies

Making decisions

At this stage, although our survey had brought up hospital organization as the biggest pain point, we made the decision that it was not within the scope of our digital product and brief to solve this problem. For example:

We ideated scheduling features, which didn’t seem relevant to solving issues specific to COVID-19, nor would it bring anything new to the market.
We felt that hospital organization and protocols regarding PPE were issues that were dependent on too many outside factors like human decision-makers and equipment distribution for us to tackle with a digital product.

Instead, we decided to focus on solving the other pain points regarding receiving COVID-19 medical information in general.

Concept test

The concept testing showed us that the target user was quite interested in an application that helped organizing and spreading the correct hospital information. The only downside was that when we put a name to our product, the participants from the concept test weren’t really sure what the product was about, which definitely had an effect on the result.

Prototype (Converge): mobile site for hospitals

Next up was making our plans into an actual product. It was time to prototype. As we discussed the MVP features in the MoSCow, it was easy to actually come up with the happy flow, and the frames that come with it. The happy flow consisted of:

The user enters their credentials to log in to the hospital page.
The user comes onto the home page with a search bar and button navigation to various medical bodies.
When the user clicks on one of the buttons, they will be directed to a page with an overview of all articles in cards/boxes in chronological order. To quickly navigate through the articles, the search bar and slide menu on top of the menu is included. The page also has a filter option on the right side of the screen.
The user then clicks on one of the articles, which has basic information such as a title, introduction to the article, and the body. At the bottom of the articles, there are tags, which links the articles to the searching process.

When we finished the paper prototype, it was a quick process to design the screens into Figma.

Test: does it work?

When the mid-fidelity prototype was finished, it was time to put it to the test. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we weren’t able to test our prototype with the defined target and user persona. Our overall findings are divided in likes and feedback.

Likes:

The prototype guides you to the desired action.
There are minimal actions required to get to the filter.
The navigation is clear and works as expected.

Feedback:

The log-out icon might not be the industry’s standard.
The filter menu could be carried out in a different manner, using the whole screen or using swipe motions to dismiss certain filters.

Summary

We are only a few months into this extraordinary time. It is still uncertain what the future holds. However, as research continues into how we will tackle this issue of COVID-19 itself, we hope it also continues into how we can develop effective assistance to the people fighting the disease on the frontlines.

Our research showed that healthcare workers were resilient and dedicated individuals who are capable of handling an incredible amount of pressure. They must be constantly educated about the dangers of infectious disease, including the proper use of personal protective equipment, clear personal hygiene instructions, and related environmental measures.

Key learnings

Start with the human need — get into your learner’s space, put yourself in their shoes. Don’t just look at what they say and think but also what they do and feel, as these things can be quite different.
Talk to your people as humans. Give people permission to be themselves, rather than corporate robots. You will be rewarded for it.

Thank you for reading! I will really appreciate any feedback!