This week we dedicated the whole day to doing a condensed design sprint, a design sprint is normally conducted over a 5-day working week, but to give us a feel for and an introduction to, the concept we would complete ours over a single day. To help speed things up we were given the area to focus on: the crisis in A&E services here in Northern Ireland. With the area of interest selected, we could begin our sprint.
For this design sprint, we created a Miro Board for all our work:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNjvpIyY=/?share_link_id=775128526328
The first day of a design sprint is spent understanding the problem conducting research, garnering expert opinion, defining the target audience, and deciding on an idea to pursue. For our design sprint, we had a team of four, and we started with research. we all knew from the news and personal experience the issues within A&E services, it was important to find evidence of how bad the problem was and where the problem originated. The desk research was overwhelming as it seemed no part of the A&E system was working as it should, for example on the morning of our sprint the estimated wait time in A&E at The Royal Hospital was 584 minutes. Many suggestions have been put forward for why the waiting times are so bad: lack of staff, lack of resources and people not using the service correctly being the reasons most cited.
With our desk research complete, we started to form How Might We? Questions to guide our design process. These questions allow us to frame the problem and ideate possible solutions. We developed several of these questions as you can see below.
We started asking the broadest possible questions and then narrowed the scope of the questions to a point where we could consider a solution. It is an obvious statement but if we could reduce the amount of people attending A&E we could reduce waiting times. From our research, we could also see that some A&E departments had significantly shorter waiting times than others and this data was freely available. We started to formulate a basic idea for a service where users could provide their symptoms and they would be directed to the most appropriate place to receive treatment. This could be their GP (or an out-of-hours GP), their local pharmacy, a minor injuries unit or if they did require A&E treatment they would be advised of the most suitable A&E location for them.
While we now had the beginning of a solution, we still needed to do more research looking at who our potential users are, how they feel and what the current process of seeking A&E care looks like. To start this process, we developed a user persona, to speed up this process we used ChatGPT to create the required information. Normally I would then create a visual asset from this information to finalise the persona and give the person a face, however, with our truncated timeframe I simply kept the information in a clear easy-to-use format so we could continue with further research.
While this gave us a lot of information it didn’t dig down into how our user felt during the process and how this affected their behaviour. For this, we needed to create an empathy map. Again, ChatGPT provided the information, however, to make use of this information we needed to place this information on an actual empathy map. This process also allowed us to put ourselves in the shoes of our persona and gain a much deeper insight into their experience and how we could help to improve it.
With an empathy map complete we now decided to look at the journey a user must take when using A&E services. We hoped that by looking at the current process we could see what aspects worked well, which caused the most issues and what opportunities were available to us to improve the process.
Through this process and the discussion, we had as a team, while completing it we were able to find several pain points for users and multiple opportunities to put a solution in place to reduce or remove these pain points.
For our last task as part of the understanding phase of the design sprint, we needed to consider what touchpoints our users would have with our solution.
The most obvious was a phone app which users would use to access our solution. However, as not everyone has access to a smartphone or is comfortable using apps, we decided we also needed to provide the option of a phone line to ensure as many people as possible could benefit from our design solution. We also spoke of how a video call facility might be useful as it could remove the need to travel for care for some users. As an idea we developed from here would be something new and not something people would have used before we felt that we would need to create training for medical professionals on how our solution would change their current workflow. We would also need to provide the public with a tutorial on how to use the service as well as it would be a change from their current way of accessing medical care. The last touchpoint we would need would be an advertising campaign that would inform the public about the new service and let them know it was now available.
With all this work complete we were able to move forward from Day 1 of the design sprint process and start on Day 2 which would include ideation and sketching. We started by discussing our ideas for a solution, through this discussion we settled on the idea of an app where users could input their symptoms, be informed of the best medical service for them, get directions to the service, have a QR code that they could scan on arrival that would share all the information they had placed in the app and finally if appropriate they would be given some basic advice on how best to treat their problem before receiving care.