Overview
Role
Undergraduate, UX Design Lead/Member
Our Team
- Olivia Le
- Sophie Regele
- Thomas Weese
- Ruoshui Zhang
- Brooke Miller
- Caroline Risewick
- Kelley McTyer
- Jackson Murray
Timeline
Zebra Technologies supported Purdue's UX Experience Studio Course, enabling our team to collaborate with Zebra on a 16-week project that concluded at the end of the Winter Semester.
Project Scope
Medical equipment is one of the essential parts of efficient patient care. Finding medical equipment quickly is a struggle for nurses that do not have an effective tracking system.
Hospital equipment needs to be easily located to ensure patients receive treatment in a timely manner. Some nurses will resort to hoarding equipment, which worsens the problem because this makes equipment unavailable to other nurses.
Our mission is to mitigate these issues and design a tracking system to help nurses find equipment more quickly. The system also needs to inform nurses of the status of equipment. This could mean knowing if the equipment is being used by someone else, being cleaned, being repaired, or being calibrated. Allow nurses to find equipment quicker and therefore support patients to receive treatment sooner.
Deliverables
Who are our users?
The user group for this project consists of hospital staff that cares for patients and the patients themselves. Nurses are the primary users of the system itself.
Process Outline
Figure 1 - Notable Zebra Technologies Products.
Figure 2 - Me Interviewing an ER Nurse Practitioner.
Figure 3- A nursing student and I ideating on potential solutions during the co-design.
Figure 4 - Above is an example of the Emergency Equipment Mapping, which I created! I found emergency equipment to be interesting due to the complexity and high intensity in the environment.
Figure 6 - Mid-Fi Home Screen of the Final Design on a Zebra Mobile Computer.
Disclaimer: To explain the project fluidly, I’ve crafted the narrative to follow a linear waterfall. Although, during the project, the team followed more of an agile sprint answering research questions. At many times we collected research data, sketched ideas, conducted analysis, and more based on our research questions. You can see the process in further detail in the link above.
Interested in reading about the Design Process further?
Final Deliverables
Final Solution: A Virtual Tracking System for Zebra Mobile Computers
In 2022, a handful of equipment tracking systems exist within the medical industry; however, none are experiences designed for nurse practitioners using mobile computers. Our team determined that developing a mobile experience was the most appropriate solution. The goal of the design was to seamlessly reduce pressure and conveniently support the nurse experience. Below is an example of a sketch that made it into our final prototype. Creating the experience without additional tasking and workload was near impossible, but how might we reduce the cognitive workload associated with the design? Below is an example of a sketch that made it into our final prototype.
Figure 7 - An initial sketch visualizing the floor availability view of equipment. Nurses wanted to see if their desire equipment was on the floor. See how it makes it into the final design!
Figure 8 - A looping video of the Mid-Fidelity Prototype we produced for Zebra showing a few of the core screens.
Analysis: User Journey Mapping
User Journey Map
By combining collected data from our research phase (persona, equipment mapping, etc.), I created a visualization depicting the equipment tracking experience from a nurse perspective.
When creating the user journey map, I broke down the process into a pre-problem, experiencing the problem, and a post-problem experience, containing 4 stages and 14+ steps before achieving the goal of a treated patient with returned equipment. In each stage of the experience, nurses may experience pain points and highlights, ambiguous decisions, and uncertainty.
Project Hand-Off: Documentation
In terms of documentation, the team passed on two useful documents. A transition document containing messages of appreciation for the Sponsor’s time and a compilation of links to the research, prototypes, Google drive resources, and more. Equally significant is the final design documentation, which not only captures our journey but serves as a resource for our sponsors going forward. Within this document the team has detailed out thought process, rationale for decision making, and annotations of design artifacts.
Experience Takeaways
As a leader, recognize every team is different.
Every team will have different strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. Adapt to the team, and align the team towards the vision we need to accomplish. Reflect on the success of activities. Be flexible and open-minded to new ideas to remain resilient.
Perfectionism is the enemy of efficiency - things don’t have to be perfect.
At times, when completing an assigned task, I find myself becoming a bit of a perfectionist. As a designer, this really slows me down in the process. I find myself working endlessly over little things. Because these changes and perfections are typically small, the work typically goes unnoticed and under-appreciated. I need/want to focus more on working quickly, iteratively, and effectively with my time.
