Health Design

  • Group size: Individual
  • DUE: Tuesday, February 6 Thursday, February 8, end of day (11:59pm).

Overview

Before your first group design sprint, this individual assignment will introduce you to some aspects of the design process:

  1. Visual Design
  2. Sketching for Ideation (using paper)
  3. Evaluation (planning)

Choose Your Problem

This should build on what you discovered in your needfinding exercise. Based on your empathy map from the previous assignment, you should now:

  • Create a "Point of View" -- remember the three key statements
    1. We Met ...
    2. We realized ...
    3. It would be game-changing to ...
  • Brainstorm "How Might We" statements
  • Narrow down to the problem you will solve...
  • Start sketching!

Information Design

Collect evidence along the way! Don’t shoot yourselves in the foot for your design reflection! Be sure to state your assumptions and document your process. Include ample photos and description of the current user experience. What are the potential pain points in the current experience? Who is the user that your design is intended for? How does your design improve upon that experience? This is intentionally somewhat open-ended to give you freedom to explore a problem and context of interest and get acquainted with the design process.

Helpful Advice:

Output: Use sketching as a tool to explore your designs. The goal here is to rapidly explore many different solutions with messy sketches. After you have thoroughly explored the design space (you should have at least 5 ideas each for 3 different screens or aspects of the experience), use paper to construct a cleaner paper prototype.

You should test this paper prototype with other people in the class. While they don’t necessarily represent your users (so this is typically bad practice), I want you to get in the habit of getting feedback on whatever you create. We’ll discuss user testing more in a week or two. Until then, do your best to get worthwhile feedback and change your prototype accordingly.

Design a more complete evaluation plan. Assume time and resources were not a problem. How would you assess if your design accomplished the goals you set out to achieve? Write a few paragraphs describing how you might conduct an evaluation accordingly. Again, don't fret too much on this part. We will learn more formal techniques in the coming weeks, so use this opportunity to be creative with your evaluation design -- but be systematic!

Deliverables

  • The output from this assignment should be the design document. Submit the link of the Medium post along with your name on Canvas. As with all design documents, it should include evidence of your design process. You do NOT need to create a demo video for this design module. For this assignment, I would expect a minimum of the following:
    • description of the problem to be solved, including POV and HMW statements
    • pictures of your various sketches
    • a cleaned up paper prototype (more broadly, the evolution of your design should be clear)
    • a description of how your designs were informed by the previous needfinding assignment
    • a description of how your incorporated feedback from your classmates
    • a description of a more complete evaluation plan
  • Grading: Grading will be based on the design rubric.