Designing digital diversions for better patient experiences
Datacom / Wellington Children's Hospital
Timeframe
Jul '23 - Sep '23
My Role
The Team
Overview
Wellington Children's Hospital launched an interactive wall for their waiting room. As part of the ongoing project, they are looking to add new content to keep it entertaining for future generations.
Goal
To keep the product fresh, our aim was to expand it's content by developing new interactions to encourage repeated playtime and cater for a new audience.
Context
The newly opened “Te Wao Nui”, Wellington Children’s Hospital, launched an interactive wall for it’s visitor waiting room alongside it’s opening.
To enhance the hospital experience, Datacom developed an interactive wall for the children's waiting room for Wellington Children's Hospital. The feature wall not only served as entertainment for visiting patients, but also as a form of diversion therapy, offering a calming and enjoyable distraction for visitors to help alleviate stress and anxiety.
The wall was part of Datacom’s idea to implement a “digital playground” where activities and games would be expanded following it's release to keep content fresh.
Why did we start this?
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Kickoff
Starting from the beginning by analysing key insights, feedback and data from the previous project
Considering we would be building on the active product, we needed to ensure we were aligned with the previous project's research and insights. This would help us in the long run as we could always come back to base.
Diversion Therapy
Ensuring the space and activities were entertaining, but did not have a stressful element to them.
Wait time didn't match interaction time
The average wait time for an appointment was ~10-15 minutes, but wall play time was ~5 minutes.
User range was smaller than expected
Users appeared to between 5-8 years old, with very few being recorded around the age of 10+ years.
One type of interaction lacks encouragement for repeated play
Hand interactions quickly became repetitive, leading to decreased user engagement with patients and visitors.
Identifying who were designing for, out-patients and in-patients.
The original personas for the previous project targeted a young demographic of in-patients and out-patients. By identifying these personas, paired with the insights gathered through data collected, we were able to progress these personas further.
The opportunity
How might we refresh the interactive wall to provide engaging content for both older and younger kids that will help ease their anxieties?
Ideation
Brainstorming for a more engaging interactive wall
For our ideation stage we brainstormed using a Miro board, adding ideas from concepts we'd seen in other public spaces to basic games that could be found in children's books.
Breaking down the problem
The main challenge was bridging the gap between a young and older audience, where we had to consider conflicting solutions
1.
Complex games for older children, but confusing for a younger audience.
2.
Simpler interactions could be repetitive for older children, losing their attention.
The concept
Using nostalgic games to bridge the age gap, with storytelling elements to make them engaging for all users.
After breaking down the problem it was easier for us to visualise two solutions that would pair with our conflicting issues, which lead us to combine familiarity and stories.
1.
Nostalgic games
Games that are learned at a young age would be simplistic enough for younger children to participate in, but also would remain familiar for an older generation.
2
Storytelling
Incorporating an interactive story element would involve an older audience and drive them to the finish line.
Introducing the concepts
Each concept introduced a chosen game and a story to go alongside it, incorporating characters from the original product.
Tic Tac Toe
Viewing the journey through the user, with storyboarding and user flows
Creating a storyboard served the purpose of visualising the journey, while the user flow was our best option for the finer details and decision a patient may make.
Viewing the journey through the user, with storyboarding and user flows
Creating a storyboard served the purpose of visualising the journey, while the user flow was our best option for the finer details and decision a patient may make.
Design process
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Design process
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Design process
Implementing hand i
The results from the current wall highlighted the repetitive interactions, thus we explored popular hand games known to all ages, as well as popular games on ipads or other interactive devies.. From chop sticks to hanky panky. We tested this throughout the office and challenged others to different games.