Brain Tumor Network
Project Duration: Sept. 2020 - Dec. 2020
Project Role: UX Designer
I was one of five UX designers given an opportunity to work with the Brain Tumor Network in Q4 of 2020 to redesign the brain tumor navigation experience for both healthcare providers and their patients and caregivers. We heavily relied on the human-centered design process to meet and exceed our user's needs.
Project Summary
Many newly diagnosed brain tumor patients and their caregivers are thrown into a completely foreign and anxiety riddled space not knowing where to go and who to seek out for help. The Brain Tumor Network asked my team and I to help redesign aspects of the brain tumor navigation journey to help ease some of the transitional pain points one might experience after finding out they or a loved one was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Empathy
In the empathy stage of the project, my team and I set out to find user needs through conducting interviews with our target population. With the challenge as vague as it was, we sought out to interview everyone who might be play a part in the brain tumor navigation process. We got our biggest nuggets of insight from interviews with caregivers of patients as caretakers usually interact with doctors and other stakeholders in the navigation process. After conducting interviews, we charted the information with many tools like empathy maps, empathy trees, and the innovator’s compass.
Define
In the define stage, my team and I mapped which users we were most interested in designing for, and looked to find insights that led to different needs in our different users. In addition, we generated a list of “How Might We” (HMW) questions as well as POV's for our potential users to help structure our ideation session.
Ideate
My team and I mapped all of our ideas on to a mural board using various ideation techniques such as benefit baiting, SCAMPER, reverse thinking, and more. After choosing a few interesting threads to pursue, we generated more defined ideas for each.
Goals
After empathy, define, and ideation, we narrowed down our goals to 3 main things:
1. Make a digestable diagram to display a patient's care network.
2. Find a way to both educate or translate the information doctors give to patients, to help patients better understand their situation and options.
3. Find a better way to display the services offered by the Brain Tumor Network to their current and future patients.
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These goals helped us narrow down the ideas we really wanted to pursue in our prototypes.
Prototype, Test, and Iterate
We came up with three main prototypes:
1. The Caregiver-Centered Framework (CCC)
The CCC is a diagram that was created after we realized through user interviews that caregivers are truly at the center of the care network for a brain tumor patient. The caregiver was the one who took care of all of the logistics and behind the scenes work so that the brain tumor patient does not have to. Because there are so many people in a brain tumor patient's care network, we wanted to create a diagram that helped caregivers better keep note of the different providers and other stakeholders in the care network.
The first iteration of the CCC. We filled in the different bubbles for people we thought would be in the care network. We received feedback on this that patients would rather have a blank canvas so they could fill in the relevant people in their network.
The second iteration of the CCC featured less connections between the network as they were distracting from the main focus of the caregiver being at the core. We also added some lines next to the bubbles to add phone numbers or email addresses. The copy patients are given only has the "caregiver" bubble filled in.
2. Nurse Navigator Liaison
The Nurse Navigator Liaison idea stemmed from the need we found in patients and caregivers and their difficulty in taking notes of the things doctors say, understanding all of the medical jargon, and then trying to make sure they ask the right questions, all while being rushed by the doctor's busy schedule. Patients often felt lost after meetings with doctors and doctors often do not have time to further answer questions as they have to quickly move to the next patient. Our idea proposed that a Nurse Navigator from BTN sit in on telehealth calls to take notes and make sure to ask the right questions, and then debrief patients and caregivers after so that doctors could save time, and patients and caregivers did not need to feel anxious about doing all of those tasks.
We used a google form to simulate an experience of being a patient or caregiver going through a doctor's visit, but with a liaison to help them and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with one current caregiver being moved to tears at the idea of how helpful something like this would have been and will be. BTN had some slight hesitations with implementing this, however, because they did not want to impose on smaller clinic's patients.
3. Redesigned Pathology Report
We designed a more digestible and friendlier version of a pathology report that focused on highlighting the important aspects and getting rid of the distracting bits to help patients and caregivers better understand their situation, as BTN constantly found themselves having to essentially translate all of the medical jargon on normal pathology reports for their patients.
After getting feedback from nurses and patients we ultimately decided that this was something more appropriate if it came from the hospitals themselves. It did, however, shed light on a new angle for ideation when a caregiver asked in a user testing evaluation for this redesigned pathology report, "Wait, you guys help figure out insurance too?!". That question told us that many current BTN patients do no know all of the wonderful services BTN offers. We set out on a new flyer type idea that helps shows current and future patients all of the services that BTN has to offer.
The BTN Welcome Package!
After all of our feedback and iterations, we came up with the BTN Welcome Package as the final iteration of our designs. The welcome package features the Patient Journey Map which helps layout the steps of what to do next after diagnosis while also showing the different services BTN offers, as well as the CCC to help patients and caregivers keep track of their care network. Both of the Journey Map and the CCC are on their website and they give a copy to each new patient today!
