For my Master graduation project I worked for six months with Barcelona Children’s Hospital Sant Joan de Déu (Spain), to improve the blood test service at their centre.
I decided to use a user-centered design process to guide me through the process of improving children’s experience during blood drawing procedure. I defined my own methodology and design process by adapting and combining the ‘experience-based design (ebd) approach’ from NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, and the ‘experience-driven design method’ from the book Advanced Design Methods for successful innovation (de Bont et al., 2013). Click on the image to enlarge the resulting design process.
FIELD RESEARCH
In order to get to know the current user experience and identify the main problem, an extensive field research was carried out during three weeks at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital.
The field trip consisted in a total immersion in the Hospital, both being hands-on in the Blood drawing department and working together with the Patient Experience department. This involved observations of around 90 patients having blood test, questionnaires to the children (and parents) to understand how they felt before, during and after the procedure; and interviews with the professionals to get to know their perspective, who included the blood drawing technicians, the department coordinator and Child Life Specialists. Lastly, to gain more empathy towards the patient and put myself in their shoes, I had my own blood drawn (even though I already had previous experience with it), which let me understand better the feelings and impressions of the children in that specific context.
No pictures of patients and professionals are shown because of privacy and confidentiality matters.
A big amount of data was gathered during the field research, both quantitative and qualitative, which had to be thoroughly analysed. For this, several data visualisations and a Qualitative Content Analysis were used. Some of the key results are visualised below, which consist in the experience of the patients according to their age, and the consequences of the patient’s fear in the overall procedure.
PATIENT JOURNEY MAPPING
I decided to create a Patient Journey Map which would gather the most relevant insights and would help to identify painpoints during the blood drawing procedure. To help develop the journey, firstly empathy maps were created from the observations and questionnaires, to find out what the users think, say, do and feel. Then the patient system was mapped, taking into account all human and non-human actors involved.
The patient journey map helped to understand the reason behind the positive and/or negative emotions of children at each stage of the blood drawing service, and to identify design opportunities. A design vision was formulated:
Reduce fear for the blood test by minimizing the initial anxiety and providing support throughout the procedure.
This should reduce the need to force and restrain the patients.
PARTICIPATORY DESIGN
Involving the users and stakeholders was one of the key points of the design process. During the ideation phase several professionals and experts in the field participated in a How to’s brainstorm, that brought many ideas on how to tackle different painpoints. Moreover, an ideation workshop was carried out with 6 to 8 years-old children. They were asked to draw their experience with blood tests, and secondly draw how they would like it to be instead. The insights gathered from these sessions were used for ideation and concept development.
During the concept development phase, several experts and stakeholders were also involved by evaluating the solution through storyboards in an iterative process. To evaluate the final experience, a test was carried out with children from 3 to 11 years old and their parents, using low-fidelity prototypes and simulating the hospital environment.
The final solution consists in a story around the blood drawing procedure that changes the meaning of the blood test into something positive and provides a tool for children to actively cope with fear. The story was built using the touchpoints identified with the journey map, . This story is introduced to the patients through a leaflet that they are given upon registration, and it includes six steps to complete the blood test like a superhero.
Other activities carried out during the project included storyboarding of the blood drawing procedure, analysis of the positioning influence on the kid's experience, research of existing solutions to reduce fear of needles and/or pain, etc.
