Summary

In addition to treating adolescents, doctors at the Division of Adolescent Medicine in Seattle Children’s Hospital created web-based content to guide parents in dealing with adolescent issues. I was part of a four-person student team that helped them come up with a method to make the content available to parents in the waiting room, via iPads.

Goal

To provide information for parents of teens about common adolescent health problems and useful resources to deal with them.

Industry & Audience

• Industry: Health management; service design
• Audience: Parents in the Adolescent Medicine Clinic's waiting room

Constraints

• Budget constraints, due to a lack of funding for this implementation.
• Only 5 iPads available.
• Only a few people to manage the implementation: design had to be of restricted burden to stakeholders.
• Time constraint: 8 weeks (part of coursework)

My Role

• One in a team of four.
• Led one of the initial interviews; provided support for the rest.
• Created one of the personas and participated in brainstorming activities.
• Independently brainstormed and developed 3 prototypes for workflow of iPad acquisition and use by parents (team members prototyped other aspects like security and iPad functionality).
• Consolidated different features into final design with team.

Process

• Acquired background understanding of design space from key members of clinic team.
• Toured the space, and conducted longer interviews with key stakeholders such as the the department head, content developer, the administrative manager, and front desk manager.
• Created a requirements analysis document and identified design goals.
  • Created personas and models to understand the design space.
• Create multiple design ideas for each aspect of the implementation: iPad functionality, security options, workflow, and evaluation.
• Selected two holistic design ideas to present to the client.
• Presented our findings and design ideas to the stakeholders in the Division of Adolescent Medicine, along with our scheme for evaluating usability, once the implementation was in place.

Key Insights

Use of models, like use case and cultural models, can really help to define the design constraints and understand limitations.

While the concept of this design (to deliver adolescent healthcare information and tips to parents) would be of great use to the intended users, this project did not have a lot of funding, tools or personnel available to dedicate to the delivery of this service. By using interviews to build up various models of the space, we were able to understand these limitations and design low-maintenance designs around these considerations.