Developing a Roadmap for Living Well with Chronic Pain
Design Opportunity
How might we help patients with chronic pain sustain their progress following an 8- to 10-week experience in a holistic, integrative chronic pain program?
Quick Facts
The Details
Role & Activities
I supported planning of research, sprint, workshop, and prototype testing activities, including leading patient interviews and feedback sessions and facilitating sprint activities and co-creative workshops, and taking the lead on writing the final documentation.
My biggest contribution to this work was proposing and leading a new research synthesis process involving creating a codebook of terms to help sort research data, tagging the data in a new software, and exporting it and printing it onto cards that we were able to physically sort during our synthesis sessions (Image 1).
I also independently planned and ran a workshop to co-create prototypes of our solution concepts with program providers and employees that informed the design of the final products we created.
Click here to read the case study I wrote about the project.
Image 1: Research Synthesis
...
Making Sense of the Patient Experience
We used card sorting to make sense of the patient interview data and identify themes and insights. We brought these insights into a four day design sprint with members of the pain program staff to immerse them in the research and create empathy before generating solutions. We also created a problem space map to help everyone visualize the pain points and facilitate a conversation about design opportunities during the sprint (Image 2).
Image 2: Problem Space Map
Image 3: Sprint
Image 4: Momentum Plan Workshop
Image 5: Testing the Tools
Making Sense of the Patient Experience
We used card sorting to make sense of the patient interview data and identify themes and insights. We brought these insights into a four day Design Sprint with members of the pain program staff to immerse them in the research and create empathy before generating solutions. We also created a problem space map to help everyone visualize the pain points and facilitate a conversation about design opportunities during the sprint (Image 2).
"Sprinting" Toward Solutions
In our sprint, we identified an area of the problem space to focus on by discussing the patient needs, our constraints, and ability to have an impact. Once we determined the focus of our sprint, we ran several rounds of divergent thinking activities to generate ideas (Image 3), then eventually narrowed them down to a set of concepts to test with our stakeholders. We captured these in the form of a storyboard which we refined to become the basis for detailed design work.
Details and Iteration
After the sprint, I planned and facilitated a workshop to prototype the final solutions. Participants worked through prompts and design criteria I developed from the research findings to help them define the the vision for each solution and what it needed to accomplish (Image 4). Small groups created and presented paper prototypes that we went on to use as input for developing the final solutions: a "momentum" workbook and goal tracking poster for patients.
We ran testing sessions with patients and refined the tools further to make them simple and more usable. We also reviewed them with program staff to make sure they would be sustainable to implement (Image 5).
Impact & Results
The program piloted the workbook and poster we created (Image 6 & 7) as well as the added role of a "Navigator" (a health coach who would meet with patients throughout the program and work with them to create their roadmap as they progressed through the program), testing them out in order to figure out how to sustainably integrate them into program operations.
Image 6: Final Workbook
Image 7: Final Poster
