Goal 1: Understanding the Context

Who is Zebra Technologies?

Zebra Technologies is a mobile computing company that specializes in technology for people to sense, analyze, and act in real time.

Zebra helps industries all over the world connect to the data they need, guide them with insights needed to take action, and optimize the workflow and operations of these companies.

Zebra manufactures and sells marking, tracking, and printing technologies.

Figure 1 - Our Team’s Project Sponsors.

What is the problem?

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. These issues and more can cause nurses to spend precious time locating this equipment and sometimes to no avail.

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.

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.

What are the existing Zebra Products?

To gauge a substantially large healthcare ecosystem, essential to our design solution, our team found it crucial to look into Zebra’s existing technologies to kick off our initial research.

Goal - Understand the current Zebra Technologies Ecosystem by exploring current systems and solutions for tracking medical equipment.

Figure 2 - Notable Zebra Technologies Products.

TC52x-HC: mobile computer used for video streaming, text message, alarms and alerts, and built-in scanning
Fixed RFID Readers: attached device used for inventory management, providing RFID tracking receiving and exit points of equipment
RFD40 RFID Sleds: handheld device that collects RFID data, able to pair with all zebra mobile devices
ZD500R RFID Desktop Printer: wireless bluetooth printer used for printing labels for healthcare tracking
Fixed RFID Antennas: scanning antenna that tracks inventory assets and equipment traffic in a variety of indoor environments
ZT410 Industrial Printer: high-resolution printer used for printing encoding UHF RFID tags

By understanding Zebra’s extensive product reach, we recognized the relevance of each piece of equipment and how this equipment can be applied and utilized in the hospital environment. The most notable devices are printers, computers, barcode scanners, RFID trackers, and tablets.

What can we learn from Secondary Research?

After gaining insights into Zebra’s current product ecosystem, our team wanted to learn more about hospital operations and the nurses’ equipment tracking experience.

Asking questions like:

“Why do things get lost in the hospital?”
“What is like to search for items?”

Through this process, our team gained a preliminary understanding of the pain points within the experience. Hospitals have no universal operations or guidelines to follow. When it comes to tracking equipment everywhere does it differently. Searching for items is incredibly difficult and ultimately where nurses can waste the most time.

“How do you track equipment inventory?”
“Who puts items back/cleans after they are used?”

Example Pain Point:

“1 Week Per Month”

Nurses spent on average searching for hospital equipment.

(Source: Uptown Health)

What do the nurses say?

To learn about the nurse's perspective, our team began conducting primary research. Given the complexity, high stress, and uncertainty of the hospital environment, our team was unable to find a hospital willing to participate in hospital observations. In projects, there will be times when a team will experience constraints and limitations. As a designer, when I experience moments like this, I always ask, “what’s the next best thing?“

For our team, we believed it was conducting stakeholder interviews and co-designing with the stakeholders.

Interviews

Goal - Gain a deeper understanding of different types of hospital workers’ personal experiences with missing equipment within the hospital environment.

We interviewed 7 total participants in a range of different specialties, such as traveling nurses, ER practitioners, & anesthetist nurses.

Figure 3.1 - Interviewing an ER Nurse Practitioner.

Top 3 Pain Points:

The Workflow - Nurses constantly travel between floors which can increase the chance of misplacing equipment
Hoarding Equipment - Nurses 'hoard' items in order to get specific equipment that is specially needed or the most suited for their patient.
Handling Equipment - The most common operation to deal with misplaced or broken equipment is communication between nurses and stockers/maintenance.

Given the early role of primary research, our team was sifting through the information and noise from the interviews. The complexity and uncertainty in the problem space were very real, but that’s why I found it so challenging and enjoyable. After completing the interview study, our team had a better understanding of the nurses’ struggles and perspectives regarding experiences with missing equipment, but we didn’t think it would be complete without retracting some strong testimonials.

Testimonials from Nurses

Co-Design with Nursing Students

o better understand some of our users and get some firsthand insight into how hospitals operate, we held a co-design workshop with a group of Purdue nursing students who had spent time in clinical at hospitals all over northern Indiana.

Goal - To strengthen our understanding of the problem space and the nurse experience, while ideating with nurses on ways to support effective tracking in the hospital setting. Develop a protocol with activities designed to get our participants to describe experiences and think about possible solutions.

Activities - Introductions, Group Conversation, Solution Ideation, Concept Sharing

Our team ran the session with 6 Purdue Nursing students.

Figure 3.2 - A photo of a nursing student and I ideating on solutions for the problem space.

Figure 3.3 - Example solution created by Nursing Student during the co-design session. The solution shows a device that tracks equipment displaying item dots on different hospital floors.

Through the research process, our team was able to gain knowledge about real nurses’ insights and understand their day-to-day working lives and the pain points within their routines to identify areas of improvement. Specifically, uncovering details about how nurses deal with missing equipment in different environments and ideating upon new solutions together.

Goal 2: Mapping the Experience

What do we know about the experience?

Persona & Room Mapping

At this stage, our team grounded ourselves through secondary and primary research. Next, to grasp the experience better, we found it important to understand the user, the environment, and how the two interact together. Our team discussed with Zebra and was provided with User Personas and Room Mapping. Although, since Zebra Designers provided the persona and room mapping, I will blur for NDA and privacy.

Figure 4.1 - Blurred Persona and Room Mapping from Zebra Designers

After understanding the users and rooms better, Zebra wanted us to fill in some of the holes in their research. Our team identified value in completing equipment mapping and user journey mapping.

Equipment Mapping

Our goal for equipment mapping was to better understand the flow and the pain points of different types of hospital equipment.

Through discussion and analysis, we divided hospital equipment into seven different categories and mapped out challenges, hopes, users, and current solutions.

Figure 4.2 - Our team identified 7 different ways to group hospital equipment. At some point our team would design for all the equipment types.

With each equipment type, we created a map to further analyze the problem space.

Our team wanted to spend time and explore more ideas. We knew with more time, we equipment type would likely present more design opportunities and potential pain points to resolve. Our team could’ve spent forever in the research phase, but we knew we should move on and explore more ideation given our insights. Therefore, due to time constraints on the project, our team decided to advance with one idea for our final problem space.

Regarding the equipment we identified, I found one I was particularly passionate about emergency equipment. I enjoyed learning about this type of equipment in my interviews with ER nurses. After understanding the nurse experience and the unique demands created by this environment, I wanted to learn/create more. Although given the project constraints, we decided as a team it was best to go in a different direction.

Below is an example of the equipment map I created for Emergency Equipment highlighting the challenges, hopes, users, and current solutions.

Figure 4.3 - Above is an example of the Emergency Equipment Mapping, which I created! I found this space to be interesting due to the high intensity environment.

User Journey Mapping

Next, our team wanted to combine aspects of our analysis to create a user journey map. By combining collected data (persona, equipment mapping, etc.), I created a realistic visualization representing the experience of a nurse perspective. When done well, journey mapping can be a great tool to understand the user and their experience.

Figure 4.4 - A journey map visualization I created to represent the nurse experience identifying pain points and highlights within the experience based on primary research.

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.

With this, we would build a tool using all of our insights that enables nurses to treat patients through finding equipment more efficiently.

Goal 3: Constrain the Scope and Ideate

Narrowing the Scope

Before our group began ideation, we knew we had to narrow down our focus. We needed to decide on the hospital persona and the type of equipment.

We knew there would not be one solution that would be able to successfully track all identified personas, equipment types, and experiences. We needed to narrow it down.

After team discussion, we believed it was best to have a conversation with our sponsor to assist in making the decision. We understood the sponsor’s desires, however, we felt it was best to make the decision together.

Together with the sponsor, we narrowed our focus to nurses using hospital-wide equipment. Next, the team aimed to ideate on possible solutions on the Zebra Mobile Computer that could cater to locating, maintaining, and finding the equipment.

Creating the Final Design

Preliminary Ideation

Next, it was time for our team to begin the ideation phase. Through several sketching sessions, the team ideated both freely and within constraints.

The team utilized three lenses for initial sketching to begin creating our experience: Nurse Communication, Nurse Behavior, and Locating Equipment. Below, are two examples the team sketched together.

Figure 5.1 - Sketch of Equipment Floor Availability View.

Nurses are able to search their desired equipment quickly see if their desired equipment is available or unavailable on a specific floor.

(Focus: Locating Equipment and Nurse Communication)

Figure 5.2 - Sketch of Live Map to View Equipment.

Nurses are able to track the live location of moving and still equipment through a map. They are also able to see what nurse is using it at the moment and page them through voice or send an automated text message that requests the equipment status to the other nurse.

(Focus: Locating Equipment and Nurse Communication)

Prototyping

For our mid-fidelity prototype design, our goal was to help nurses find the exact location of the device faster with map markers. We wanted to be able to show the status of the device in as few steps as possible, such as availability.

Part 1 : Building a Home Screen for a Zebra Mobile Computer

The primary goal was to create access to needed tools, such as location, storage, and more. The data tools would have their own page (which you will see next), and the home screen would act as the hub and main navigator for those tools. With the home screen, we built the essentials and designed them with efficiency in mind. The team would conduct concept testing and make iterations later.

There are 3 main parts to the home screen: nurse profile, accessing the current floor’s data, and accessing the other floor’s data.

Part 2 : Visualizing the Live Map for a Zebra Mobile Computer

For this screen, we needed to create a seamless search tool displaying a live map with information on the corresponding desired devices. To our knowledge, we believed measuring idle time was the best way to convey item usage without adding responsibility and workload to the nurses.

On the Live Map, there are 3 main components: the search bar, the live map, and the digestible information.

Part 3 : Creating Storage Room Information for a Zebra Mobile Computer

Here, the goal was to create mobile accessible information about the needed tools in the storage room. Using the mobile computer and tracking technology, the nurse’s would be able to access all this information.

There are 3 main parts to the Storage Room Screen: search bar, image of tool, and storage room data.

Our goal for the concept testing was to get a better understanding as to if our screens would be applicable within the nursing field, along with figure out what we could make better.

We returned to the interviewed nurses and our sponsors to identify pain points in our design and generate new ideas before heading into the last stretch of the design process.

Concept Testing

From our concept tests, we found that there were multiple aspects of our designs we were able to improve upon. We also were unhappy with the overall appearance of the screens, and wanted to improve the overall interface.

Improvements:

location of storage rooms
direct messaging
item specific location within rooms

pin points for items

more personalized screens

Goal 4 : Finalizing the Design

Final Design Walkthrough

For our final design, our goal was to make a seamless and simple way for nurses to know exactly where equipment was located. We wanted our solution to add as little as possible to the already heavy workload of nurses.