Situation: A radical new product idea needed strategic design input to define what the user experience would be, including initial startup, feature discovery over time, and integrating the product into their daily lives.
Task: Understand how users experience their disease, their coping strategies, how they progress through their life with the disease, the breadth of user behavior—both broad and detailed.
Action: A partner from a design agency and I interviewed numerous patients in their homes and doctors in their clinics in rural Arkansas, San Francisco, Copenhagen, and London. Most in-home interviews were 2 hours long and we worked from an outline of themes that we wanted to cover and otherwise let the user “lead” the interview, which allowed us to discover what was important to them. There were a lot of emotional moments in the interviews, sometimes from patients and sometimes from loved ones; these emotional moments helped us identify points that really hit home and resonated with users.
Result: We found that it’s not age or disease-state that determines someone’s willingness to use the product, but rather their general attitude, which cuts across all demographic lines. This led us to a UX strategy of having three layers of interaction—one for novices, one for intermediates, and one for experts—on the product, with subtle nudges and encouragement for moving people from novice towards expert. In addition to making the product more engaging, this strategy would give some bit of “life” to the product, which would go a long way in helping people perceive the product more as a companion and less as a sterile piece of medical technology. The following diagram illustrates this strategy:
