Prologue
This course will be directed and taught by Paul, ‘The UX of Health’ is the primary topic name for this module. Before we got into the details of the module, Paul showed us a blogging program called Notion, it looks like a nice alternative to campus press that I could use for this module or even in final year. I will definitely give it a look, I think I may use this program for future blog posts if it proves to be very useful and easy to use.
This module will be a sort of tester for our final year, some of the stuff we will be covering will be similar to what we will be doing for our final major project. The project itself is to design a product for the health care sector, whether that be NHS, Health and Social care or the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service. Who will my target audience be? Could it be for the public or health professionals like doctors, nurses, carers or paramedics? These are the first questions I will need to look at.
Initial Idea Generation
I will need to look at a lot of different things, such as does my audience have digital access? Maybe the network goes down and the product needs to perform even when offline.
Some ideas I have thus far are;
- An app for home care workers, to maybe better record their visits with clients?
- Maybe an app/product for road user to help make them better aware of keeping the roads clear for emergency services.
- Maybe an app for people and prescriptions. Seeing doctors can be a nightmare so maybe an online app curated and controlled by the NHS to dispense prescriptions to people.
- Perhaps an app used by pharmacists to keep a better log on prescriptions.
- An app for veterinarians or clients to help with their care.
- Cats Protection League.
- RSPCA.
I have assess to pharmacists and carers and nurses for first hand direct research, these people I can questions to regarding what they would love to see that could make their job much better and/or what they would think could provide a much better service to customers, especially with COVID, as they are under a lot of pressure. In terms of animal care, I could visit my local equestrian centre which belong to a family that used to teach me in college.
I will need start of firstly by researching UX design related to Health Care, and looking at existing apps and products in use at the moment. At this moment I am going to keep my research mainly over a broad range of topics and areas, once I have gathered enough of research I will then choose a topic to focus on. This way I will have a good collection research and first hand evidence as a basis to develop from.
All the research and discovery we do at the start will be in teams, once we move onto making the product we will move working solo.
What is User Experience Design?
Paul asked us what is our definition of User Experience Design, in our words; To me UX design is the solution to a problem, to design a solution for a digital problem users face.
When Designing UX, we have to look at the emotional, physical and digital aspects, because after all at the other end is a human, someone who just like us has emotion, goals and different levels of technological experience. We have to bear all this in mind when designing something.