User Experience Designer
The Story
One of the great courses offered by the Wisconsin Healthy Institute of Aging is a free six-week program, Healthy Living with Diabetes (HLWD). This course focuses on diabetes management and how to live a healthier and more balanced lifestyle. In September 2021, our cohort teamed up with the Wisconsin Health Institute of Aging to help better recruit members of the Black population, as 21% of the Black population has diabetes in Wisconsin, but only 3% of HLWD participants are Black. As a result, the Black population is severely underrepresented among HLWD participants.
The Challenge
Over a four month period, I led a team of three designers in my Masters of Science in Design + Innovation capstone course, to explore ways to help HLWD reach the people who are in need of their services.
Discover
To get to know the people we were hoping to help, we conducted fourteen 1-1 interviews with facilitators of the HLWD workshops, participants of the program, and members of the broader diabetes community to understand the struggles and feelings that come along with diabetes.
Define
After completing our research, we pulled out the main insights that were consistent across multiple participants and developed corresponding principle for our team.
These guiding insights and principles lead us to three opportunity areas to build solutions.
After receiving feedback from our users and several more ideation exercises, we decided to move forward with A Guiding Hand from Day One Diagnosis. It was here, from Day One, that we could have the most direct and immediate impact on the lives of those with diabetes.
Develop
To start prototyping our solution, we went back through our interviews to understand the feelings that come up in the current diagnosis experience and what they wished they had gotten out of the experience.
The Solution
Backed by research and exploration, we built our prototype solution, the Diabetes Navigator, an experience that starts the relationship between HLWD and the individual at the moment of diagnosis.
Feedback
& Iteration
With a prototype in hand, we went back to the user we spoke to during the discovery phase to get their feedback and ensure we were meeting their needs.
Not all of the feedback was positive and there were a few opportunities for improvement, so we made some changes to the designs to be more inclusive and useful for our users.
Validation
Our final task was to assess if our solution stayed true to our original opportunity to be a guiding hand from day one diagnosis. While much of the feedback in our prototype testing supported the validation of this idea, none was more strong than the feedback received from a past participant of HLWD who ignored her diabetes diagnosis for 10 years.
