HUDDLE

In 2015 St. Mary’s General Hospital (SMGH) partnered with grad students studying User Experience to get an innovative perspective into improving the staff experience, specifically safety.

This is my story of designing ‘Huddle’—an interactive, communications based, workplace solution for the hospitals of tomorrow that empowers the health professional of today.

MY ROLE

This project took place over the winter term of 2015. I assumed the role of User Experience Designer as Product Owner (UXPO) to ensure success of the project and  to maintain synergy of early design ideas and client requirements.

I was responsible for project management, research strategy, UX design outputs, and insight development. Working alongside my small team, I conducted market and user research, met with stakeholders, conducted extensive contextual field studies, and presented our findings to the hospitals.

THE CHALLENGE

REDUCING INCIDENTS OF STAFF INJURY

SMGH approached us with two primary objectives— come up with innovative solutions to reducing the number of staff injuries that were occurring (specifically musculoskeletal injuries) and provide innovative solutions to improving employee safety culture.

For SMGH working with us signalled an openness to new ideas in an environment that is otherwise pre-occupied with traditional thinking, bureaucracy and a focus on numbers. With a 10 week timeline we focused our effort on delivering a tangible prototype in Huddle while also delivering a report with actionable secondary and tertiary insights.

THE APPROACH

A HOLISTIC EXPERIENCE FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS

We were excited  and also overwhelmed by the scope of our challenge. We had to educate ourselves on the medical industry and immerse ourselves in the data and do it fast. We took a collaborative approach to the project and quickly realized our problem wasn’t about about the number of injuries rather the nature of communication surrounding injuries, safety and training.

We conducted market and user research, met with stakeholders, conducted interviews and did extensive contextual field studies. This approach was necessary to gain buy in from our stakeholders as well as develop empathy for the users in order to develop a representative solution.

Our client provided us with frequent access to their facilities and staff allowing us to conduct ethnographic research. We interviewed a diverse spectrum of staff members to gain insight and understanding into the day-to-day challenges of staff and their experiences with safety.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

After leading a collaborative user journey mapping session with my team, we realized there was a gap between safety training and long term performance/ safety culture. We were able to connect a number of noted behaviours from our interviews with this very same insight. We questioned how best to bridge this behavioural gap. Rather than point the finger at people or existing processes we decided an interactive, community oriented solution would be better suited to create long term change.

THE DISCOVERY

THEY NEED A COMMUNITY SOLUTION

Insights from our discovery phase indicated that there were a number of areas related to the issue of staff safety. We discovered that although training is extremely important, it was only one component in encouraging long-term performance.

If we truly wanted to encourage lasting change we needed to create a holistic solution that would engage staff in their environment and give them ownership over needs relating to:

• Safety as a cultural theme in the workplace
• Proactive safety behaviour on duty
• Strengthening training through mental rehearsal
• Increasing employee satisfaction by eliminating pain points
• Crowdsourcing ideas for improving safety
• Upvote/ Downvote system to encourage feedback
• Providing approachable metrics that can’t be ignored

These insights began pointing to an interactive solution that would replace the existing hub for community and communication in the workplace, the huddle board.

THE VISION

A SAFER HOSPITAL
BROUGHT TOGETHER BY TECHNOLOGY

Our vision was to create a collaborative tool that would provide more engaging opportunities for feedback, communication, and training by empowering healthcare providers to share their experiences. We would provide a painless interaction that would allow staff to learn from one another, engage with each others ideas and ultimately create a safer hospital.

PAINLESS INTERACTION

Our first objective in designing Huddle was to ensure it would address users needs so they would be able to focus on being safe on the job.

SAFE AND FUN

Our vision was to provide a platform where users can review and refresh their safety training through fun and interactive games built into the system.

CULTURE=COMMUNITY

We envisioned empowering SMGH’s healthcare providers, where users could collaborate on ideas to make their workplace safer and enhance the community.

THE REQUIREMENTS

THE KOBAYASHI MARU: A NO-WIN SCENARIO

Our development timeline gave us only 10 weeks from the beginning of the project to final presentation. We quickly discovered that this just wasn’t enough time to come up with the solution the client wanted.

Subsequently, we refocused our efforts to develop:

• A primary solution -  something tangible that the client could realistically implement
• report containing:
  • Secondary solutions we identified from insights that could be implemented quickly with supporting secondary research
  • Suggested areas of interest we identified but didn’t have time to fully investigate

INTERPRETING REQUIREMENTS FROM INSIGHTS

After conducting collaborative research and brainstorming sessions we were able to isolate a number of behaviours and use them as a basis for our personas. We segmented them into behavioural affinities and aligned brainstormed content and features with the needs of our personas.

This allowed us to determine what content and features would be useful to our users and to determine fit with our primary solution or whether they were better suited as a secondary option.

LETS GET TECHNICAL

We wanted to meet our clients needs by providing them with innovative insights into their problems but, we also wanted to demonstrate the worth of interdisciplinary teamwork and UX principles to traditional industries. This meant presenting something that would allow them to see our solution in action.

We wanted to present a tangible prototype so Huddle would have to exist within the technological and budgetary constraints of reality. This meant getting technical and doing research into the components and costs of making Huddle.

THE FRAMEWORK

BUILDING A FOUNDATION

In order to meet our requirements we had to identify the best opportunity to maximize potential impact. We settled on the huddle board as the thematic opportunity to address the needs of all of our stakeholders. Before we could start designing our new solution, we spent a great deal of time making sense of and identifying all the opportunities in our existing content.

VISUAL THINKING

In order to understand some of the challenges and many touch points a new nurse might encounter in their safety onboarding with the hospital, I mapped out workflows. This helped me to understand how Huddle could address specific pain points in the staff experience as well as maximize opportunities for improving safety.

SKETCHING INTERFACES

We decided to take a collaborative approach to interface design, each individually sketching out our vision for the Huddle interface on paper. By using paper prototyping techniques we were able to collaboratively evaluate what we did and didn’t like. I collected team feedback and used it to inform the wireframes.

WIREFRAMING

Moving the design forward I used the paper prototypes and feedback from my team to inform the wireframes for the final prototype. I used Omnigraffle to create a visual experience that would allow the team to truly understand how Huddle would work and interact.

HIGH-FIDELITY MOCKUPS

Wireframes were used to inform hi-fidelity mockups that would later be used to bring our design to life through the magic of video and green screen. Communication, collaboration and iteration was integral to solving the interaction design of Huddle and building a believable experience.

DETAILED DESIGN

INTRODUCING HUDDLE

The video below demonstrates the philosophy of Huddle, it’s functionality and why it’s the right solution for improving safety at SMGH. 

DELIVERING EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

We envisioned educational modules that would be able to teach, refresh and test employees. We explored concepts from gamification and incorporated best practices to make a truly engaging and educational experience that would be fun and relevant to the user. Personal profiles, points and leaderboards encourage competition and community.

COMMUNICATING GOALS

Huddle provides employees with easy to read and understand metrics for safety and goals being monitored by management. This ensures staff are not only on board with objectives but also able to clearly understand the metrics that inform them and how they can make a difference.

MOTIVATING AND EMPOWERING

Huddle provides employees with a community where they can voice their ideas for improving the workplace. They can evaluate and provide feedback on ideas and allows for a collaborative effort in creating a safer environment.This motivates and empowers employees to make safety a priority and it helps in creating a culture of safety.

ELEGANT SOLUTIONS TO FRUSTRATING TASKS

A major pain point and distraction for employees on the job is scheduling. Huddle provides an integrated, easy to use scheduling manager that allows employees to access their schedule remotely, trade shifts and request time off effortlessly all while keeping their manager informed. This lets employees take their minds off of frustrating day-to-day tasks and focus on their passions.

THE IMPACT

CARE, INNOVATION, COMPASSION

We suggested many large and small-scale solutions that we think will move them in the right direction in terms of overall safety, community and culture. Our primary solution, Huddle, would make the experience of visiting and interacting with the staff huddle board more engaging as well as give the employee ownership over certain tasks while using subtle behavioural nudges to encourage safety.

While working on this project I learned a great deal about managing and solving what seems like an unsolvable problem. In class we heard it all the time, go outside. It was only when I did finally get outside of the problem space that I had a lot of my breakthrough ideas and thoughts that lead to our solution. If you can’t solve the problem then change the parameters of your solution and that’s exactly what we did.