User research • Interviews • Survey • Facilitation • Prototyping • Healthcare • E-learning
date. May - Dec ‘18
scope. The study is conducted in the scope of the COPE project. COPE is a research project aiming to explore the transition in health and social services and its impact on employment, competence needs, and development. We had the opportunity to work on one of its sub-themes: multicultural work communities; which focuses on providing digital support to boost multicultural understanding in healthcare. The stakeholders involved THL (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare), Axxell Multicultural Center, and Aalto University.
team. 2 Service design and engineering students acted as UX researchers, collaborating with different stakeholders
outcome. The study let us clearly understand the target audience’s (primarily nurses) needs and how to deliver E-learning content for them. Insights from the research were used in the content development and information architecture design of online training.
Journey
Our journey started with looking into previous research done in the scope of this project and E-learning. This provided valuable insights into the expectations of the target audience.
We continued with conducting in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals, where we also included some of the stakeholders as observers.
We kept close communication with stakeholders and get them exposed to the user’s voice throughout the project as much as possible. This drove making joint decisions based on user insights.
In our interviews, we realized that the multicultural understanding of a healthcare professional is mostly dependent on communication with the patient. Therefore, we decided to look at the other side of the coin. We designed and published a survey for patients from different cultural backgrounds in Finland, that was shared with many organizations around the country.
Refined problem domain
The insights gathered from the survey and interviews let us shape the big picture of the problem domain and see how multicultural understanding and awareness boils down to different aspects of communication.
We continued with designing the concept of how an E-learning solution could help ease the communication troubles in multicultural encounters, where we valued co-creation and ideation.
We created paper prototypes to understand which elements of E-learning we can bring up in the final product. We tested them with healthcare professionals and gathered feedback from stakeholders.
Solution
The iterated solution concept focused on easing multicultural encounters relies on supporting healthcare professionals’ interests and needs by
Integrating multicultural training into an existing web portal already in use by healthcare professionals
Providing flexibility on the pace and access of training
Acknowledging the existing experience of healthcare professionals with patients from different cultures
Providing experiences from other professionals, uncommon cases, and video lectures to keep the training engaging and worth their while.
Providing condensed material for further discussions with colleagues and patients