[Renewal Design] iDeliver: A Digital Companion to Support Skilled Birth Attendant
VecnaCares, Johns Hopkins University, Scope Impact
Developing a new feature to support clinicians handle complications during intrapartum care. The goal was to redesign diagnostic and management protocols to a tablet-friendly format that is easy for clinicians to retain information under a high-pressure environment and integrate the new feature into the current system.
My Role: UX Researcher & Designer
* iDeliver is a digital tool that supports skill birth attendants with guidance, documentation and relevant data during intrapartum care in low-resource settings. The tool was originally designed in 2015 and has been through several rounds of iterations for improvements and new feature development.
Our client wants to extend the feature of the product by including WHO guidelines and protocols. The design challenge is to redesign diagnostic and management protocol to an easily-retained format for clinicians when they are under a high-pressure environment. In addition, define the user flow to integrate this new management plan to the current system.
The result is a checklist format management plan and the updated user flow to integrate the new feature into iDeliver – where clinicians can launch the management plan with minimum clicks.
- Before: What does a clinician need to know in order to confirm the diagnosis? (User flow & Contents)
- During: What support does a clinician need to know in order to take the necessary steps to manage the patient? (Contents, Challenges & Opportunities)
- After: Why would a clinician follow/complete the iDeliver Management plan? (Drivers & Value propositions)
Use personas and situational questions to guide participants to talk through their workflow. Besides, create an open space for participants to share the challenges they face in the specific situations and what kind of support they wish to receive from the digital tool.
Benchmark the existing cases with participants. Ask participants to share their thoughts on “advantages/disadvantages of the format”. The exercise helps us form visual elements and principles for the design.
The woman’s observations suggest that she may be suffering from a condition. EITHER clinician picks a diagnosis from the list, OR they confirm a diagnosis suggested as ‘possible’ by iDeliver.
User Case B: Retrospective completing of record
Target user: Experienced clinicians who use iDeliver as a documenting tool
A woman has undergone management of a condition. The clinician opens iDeliver and manually adds the correct diagnosis into her record. From here they open the Management Plan in the same manner as in Use Case A.
Through research and user testing, we identified the use cases. This helps restructure user flow and discover additional product opportunities.
- The management plan should make available for both live and retrospective manners.
- Leave room for dismissing and adding actions in the management plan. This allows iDeliver system to document clinicians’ workarounds when the resource suggested is unavailable locally.
- Automate the diagnosis management record to become part of the patient notes was one of the favorable benefits that resonated among clinicians. The automated note will save tremendous work time dedicated to paperwork.
with Medical Experts and Tech Team while designing
medical guidance and automated patient note.
- Create a structure to display protocol. Categorize the information as “TASK”, “NOTE”, “QUESTION”.
- Apply accordions structure to expand/collapse information needed. With the function of checking the group of actions at one goal.
- Customize the management plan for each patient. The options of dismiss, reopen, add actions to the default plan.
- Checklist format enabling timestamps in the backstage, automated the confirmed actions as part of patient notes.
While providing a clear at-a-glance overview of the Management Plan with sufficient information but not too overwhelmed for users was the goal for designing, there are risks that a practitioner may unintentionally skip the protocols when the information is allowed to expanded/collapsed.
Moreover, we identify that a junior clinician (user type A) is more in need of following protocols in real-time when conducting user testing through two user archetypes’ perspectives. Therefore, it is important to have all the sections expanded when the management plan is first opened. Therefore, the design by default, accordions are expanded and branching paths show both yes and no options and set their status neutral and have both their sub-actions visible but inactive.
During the user testing, we realized that the delete button for diagnosis became redundant with the newly-added prompting questions for a user to indicated the type of case when the user attempt to add a new diagnosis into iDelvier.
As incorporating two use cases (live/retrospective) into the current design, the system needs to know whether the diagnosis is current or resolved when they intend to add a new one. While the delete function was meant to avoid the situation of making an accidental click, this prompt question naturally serves as a secondary confirmation for the new diagnosis. Thus, the team agreed to take down the delete button.
Want to know more?
Drop me a line. I’m always happy to meet new people and chat over coffee!
hello.fangyi@gmail.com