During my role as a Graphic Designer at NEC Australia, I had the chance to contribute on projects with the various product teams in the organisation. One of these projects was for Western Australia Country Health Services (WACHS). For whatever reason my engagement on these projects was generally requested late in the process and with little time to provide my expertise in visual design, this project was no different in that regard.
The project for WACHS was to develop and deliver a patient monitoring and triage kiosk that served patients, as well as staff, relevant information at all the WACHS sites.
Provide patients information on wait times, number of people in the queue and what triage designation they were assigned, similar to what you find at most Transport Authority waiting rooms. With the aim of opening up the transparency of information to improve the patient’s understanding of when they will be seen to while in the waiting room.
Provide hospital staff a way to interact with this data on the go or at their desks at a deeper level than shown to the public, observe where problems may be occurring by displaying key metrics; to be able to adjust more quickly when demand increases and know where it was occurring.
Being brought into the project at such a late date means that my journey for this was quite short, to illustrate where the project was at, the developer was already in the coding stages. Adapting to this scenario with the developer assigned to the project however was a good learning experience. He and I quickly built rapport and recognised each other’s’ strengths resulting in an effective collaboration bringing the interface design up to par with the design mock-ups that I had carried out in the days prior.
With an existing high fidelity prototype development already being well underway the initial design mock-ups were more detailed than would typically be the case, the process of ideation, creating wireframes, prototyping and testing from my experience with this project was not carried out as vigorously and with full engagement from the team as it perhaps should have been.
The design was centred around the two highlighted outcomes mentioned earlier, as part of that, there were requirements for two form-factors: Desktop PC / Widescreen Panel and Tablet devices to be designed for. The following use-cases were drawn from an understanding that each type of end users (Patient and Staff) would have different needs as part of the briefing:
The prototype was submitted / demonstrated to the client who provided small changes, though nothing particularly relevant to the layout design, this info was passed back to the developer and I to implement. The process repeated a couple more times until the client was satisfied, at which point the project / product was finalised for handover.
This project regrettably did not follow any particular design methodology or UX process that I’m aware of, from my point of view it was rather ad-hoc. This apparent lack of process or open collaboration provided me with important lessons that left me asking myself, is there a better way to do this and was one of the turning points for me to explore the avenue of UX design.
If the process had been reflective of a design thinking methodology, cross functional collaboration and more open testing with the target audiences would have been just two of many key improvements that could have made to ensure the project was handled more effectively for the team.
The main takeaway that has stayed with me since being part of this project is: there is often no perfect world. It is important to adapt to the conditions as you are given or see them. In this case, having information handballed, little time, and low engagement with the client - and even then it was usually second or third hand information reaching me - means that it was difficult to achieve a full understanding of the expectations and requirements.