Timeline
June - August 2020 (part-time)
Primary Function
Product Designer, User Researcher
Overview
In the Summer of 2020, I interned with an early stage start-up, Evva Health, as a product designer helping the co-founders ideate and design user experiences that reduce dementia caregiver burden by leveraging community resources and improving dementia patient and provider interactions. I worked collaboratively with founders, community engagement and health informatics interns to design product offerings, user stories, features, mobile interfaces, and source and synthesize user goals and needs.
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I will only discuss my work at a hi-level as I have signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), but I am open to speaking in more detail in a private forum.
USER RESEARCH
Before I could begin designing product features and interfaces for dementia caregivers, I knew I had to learn more about their work and the mental health disorders that they look to improve. As a son and caregiver to my mother who is Type 2 Bipolar, I had some reference experiences providing care and navigating healthcare and legal systems, but that wasn't enough.
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Below are a few resources that I used to better acquaint myself with the goals, needs, and journeys that professional and informal dementia caregivers experience.
AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving Reports
Co-Founder Institutional Knowledge
Alzheimer Research Center Webinars and Reports
ALZConnect Community Forum
Mental Health Community and Health System Blogs
Commercial Caregiving
Service Offerings
Maximizing Internal Expertise
I distilled all the information I could gather into an excel formatted journey map. At the same time, I was asked to help the health informatics interns prepare for and deliver a contextual inquiry and a process flow deliverable for a healthcare system partner. I realized that I could co-opt not just the client insights the interns uncovered, but the interns's own caregiving experiences to develop more robust personas and user journeys.
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Over the course of a few instructional sessions, I socialized the interns to the concept of personas and user journeys to have them translate their own dementia care giving experiences into inputs for journey maps I was designing.
This is journey map template that I adapted from the Nielsen Norman Group. I operationalized the completion of this exercise over 1 month hosting synchronous how-to and show-and-tell sessions as well as asynchronous info exchanges through Google Sheet comments and Slack conversations.
I prepared examples of how one could go about filling in and conceptualizing the input category and phases, but didn't anticipate the interns to not understand that the first time I socialized it. It took a few conversations to help the interns learn how to abstract and segment their experiences into phases of work, as opposed to day-to-day events.
Hi-Fidelity Journey Maps
After making sense of all the information I sourced from my own research and that of the interns own personal experiences I was able translate those inputs into easy to consume user journey maps. I designed two journey maps that addressed 4 sets of personas - two sets of professional and informal caregivers. I designed journey maps using Figma and left the team a template to use for other user journeys, namely providers and dementia patients.
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Click here to see a PDF of all caregiver journey maps!
I designed the personas to be brief and behavioral, juxtaposed next to one another to see how their journeys differ across the same experience phases. I used color coding and numbering to associate experience events and attributes with the persona and corresponding product/solution ideas. The goal was to help people on my team "connect-the-dots" and explore relationships between experience events and attributes across both personas and their journeys.
PRODUCT DESIGN
I was asked to develop a set of product modules, features, and mobile interfaces for experiences that help community service providers promote and deliver their services to caregivers and dementia patients. While I can't go into much design detail, I will elaborate on how I facilitated design brainstorming and problem scoping virtual sessions with two interns I was managing.
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Since we were all working remotely, I used a variety of online collaboration tools to facilitate problem space and solution brainstorming as well as to organize and disposition product user stories and features.
Team
Product Owner, Designer, Researchers
My Role
Lead Designer
Product Manager
Tech
Whimsical (Brainstorming), Google Sheets (Documentation), Figma (Interface Design)
Leading the Design Process
At the beggining of the project, I held bi-weekly brainstorming sessions synchornously and a synchornously using Whimsical, a visual workspace, where I programmed and managed out collaborative problem space and solution scoping sessions.
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Left: Guidelines I designed and taught my interns to effectively collaborate during virtual brainstorming sessions. Right: an example of our thoughts and findings visualized on the Whimsical visual collaboration canvas.
After the team was in a good enough place having identified solution and problem space attributes and considerations, I migrated the most salient features and use cases over to a spreadsheet to better organize our findings. I worked with the interns and my manager to disposition and think through which user stories and features were most appropriate for Evva given the user and market research performed thus far.
Final Deliverables
1
Ideated and dispositioned 4 service offerings, 18 user stories, and 44 features
2
Developed 4 information architecture diagrams and 9 user workflows across 4 service offerings
3
Designed 20 hi-fidelity mobile interfaces for caregiver stories and features
REFLECTIONS
At Evva Health, with no professional designers on staff, I had to manage-up, teach non-designers, and seek external resources to validate and design valuable and well-informed deliverables. I relied heavily on my communication, management, and ideation skills to extract knowledge from interns and stakeholders to design user experiences that reflect the goals and needs of users that Evva sought to help.
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I learned healthcare app interface design trends and patterns through my own research and experimentation with prebuilt assets from other UI designers. Not having many design constraints was frustrating at times, but also exciting because I had the opportunity to inform not only the look and feel of Evva's interfaces and product features, but it's brand and identity as well.
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Although I didn't receive the design mentorship that most interns would receive in a traditional ux or product design internship, I learned about the different approaches a small team could take to design and bring a product to market. It was great learning from the co-founders about the product roadmap, development options, and fundraising opportunities. Being exposed to and understanding how development and business activities influence a product's design, especially in a start-up context, has made me more aware of how I can approach future design projects or entrepreneurial endeavors.
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PERFITS
MOBILE APP
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