Background
All healthcare professionals who care for newborns at the time of delivery should regularly complete a course in neonatal resuscitation.
Together with a leading authority in the field we have been developing a new course where learners can train on a manikin and get precise real-time feedback on their psycho-motor skills.
The Task
Our team was tasked with developing a neonatal CPR course for doctors and nurses. The equipment includes a sensorized manikin and several types of ventilation devices. Our team worked both on software and hardware parts of the product.
💡 Process: design research → concept development → prototyping → user testing and interviewing
Design Research
Together with a learning specialist and a medical specialist, I conducted interviews and workshops resulting in a design brief and a number of visualizations. This affinity diagram gave our small team the direction for concept development work. I produced various kinds of UX maps as well.
Affinity diagram — one of deliverables that came out of the initial design research.
Concept Development
After the research was finished and presented, I lead cross-functional teamwork and co-creation. Our team worked on different levels of granularity — from rough mindmaps to detailed user journey maps to concepting specific UI elements.
Concept Development Process
A detailed user journey timeline
We made several user journey diagrams for a number of potential scenarios.
First rough concepts of different live feedback options
Prototyping
Our approach
My proposal was to use functional prototyping as the most effective approach for this particular product. We needed to learn about the user experience of both software (training course) and hardware (manikin and ventilation equipment), and the software/hardware interaction.
The precision of the experience matters a lot in this particular case. While a learner ventilates the manikin, the system gives live feedback to a learner via the laptop. That included visual and audible feedback. The experience of that live feedback was an especially important topic in our project.
A welcome screen of our course prototype (the software part)
Technology
The prototypes were built largely by me. We used JavaScript, HTML, CSS and connected the devices (sensorized manikin and ventilation devices) via WebBluetooth and WebUSB. That allowed the prototypes to provide real-time visual and audible feedback in response to ventilating.
We tested multiple concepts and addressed several hypotheses.
With these prototypes our team exceeded the company's expectations because:
- The prototypes were built in a short time and without involving any developers;
- We were able to test key features very early, in a project where low-fidelity testing would not provide the necessary level of insight.
Hardware
Hardware prototyping was also a part of the project. Another designer was responsible for it, but I took part in defining the requirements.
A prototype of a training station (the hardware part)
User testing
User testing was done with different user groups — learners and educators (subject matter experts).
Testing some of the live graph versions
“This is better than anything we’ve ever had for sure.”
Outcomes
- The functional prototyping approached proved very productive and allowed us to get a realistic and detailed feedback from out test participants. Automatic application of metadata. That was the highest impact improvement.
- The prototypes that we built became a solid foundation for all further work. They were later used, with modifications, in several rounds of user tests.
- Through this process we made conclusions on several hypotheses and defined what needs to be done for further iterations. The project is being continued with more iterations of concepts and more user testing.
- This project exist in a complex organizational structure and involved a lot of stakeholders. Our team's prototyping work has been very helpful in communication with them and served as a very tangible and helpful illustration of product ideas.