Carevo

The idea for this design is one that I have actually been thinking about for a pretty long time. My mom is a nurse and has been one for my entire life. I have grown up listening to her talk about the ups and downs of her job. When I began pursuing UX, I started looking at the frustrations she had with her job in a new light. I quickly realized that many of the challenges she faces could be solved if someone sat down and actually applied strong UX design thinking to the issues that nurses face on a daily basis. One challenge I have heard my mom talk about for as long as I can remember is the frustration that comes with trying to communicate with patients that cannot speak english and the lack of reliable resources to aid the translation process.

TARGET USERS

Nurses:

need to accurately relay important medical information to patients
family members that translate dont always properly convey what the patient is saying
dont have time to wait for a hospital translator to arrive

Patients:

cant communicate with nurses about pain, meds, and procedures
family members dont accurately translate what they are saying
scared and/or discouraged to ask questions due to language barrier

PROBLEM:

GOAL:

Nurses are struggling to converse with patients from differing language backgrounds which leads to misconstrued medical information, confused patients, and frustrated nurses.

Close the language gap between nurses and patients in order to better facilitate important medical conversations.

DISCOVERY PHASE

I surveyed 12 nurses who worked in critical patient care areas of hospitals to collect information about nurses experiences with non-english speaking patients and the current resources available to help them communicate with those patients.

MAIN THEMES FROM RESEARCH

nurses dont have a lot of spare time
hospital translation services are a pain to use and have at least a 5 minute wait time
nurses care most about medications, allergies, and patient history
nurses typically have around 7 non-english speaking patients a month

Through talking to nurses, I was able to begin to picture what this app should look like and more importantly, how it should function.

DEFINE PHASE

During this phase, my main goal was to identify the main features and flow of my app. I started out by creating a journey map that outlined the process a nurse would go through to initiate a conversation with a non-english speaking patient. Since most nurses are running on a pretty tight schedule and frustrated by how long it can take to connect with a translator, I knew that my users need to be presented with a straightforward and easy to use experience. I also realized that it was essential that all translation taking place was done correctly as the mistranslation of critical medical information like medications and medical issues could lead to serious risk. Because of this, I decided that I would need to include a device into my concept that would act as a powerful listening and speaking tool for the patient.

Along with a user journey, I created some sketches of potential screens and their main features. I also made one for the accompanying device. Though I wasn’t planning on creating a finished concept design of the device, I still wanted to make sure to have a good idea of how it might work and interact with the app.

I decided that the device would be one that a nurse can clip onto a hospital bed and easily manipulate with a bendy ‘neck’. The process of connecting to the device would be done with nurses step by step, and they would be given the opportunity to check with the patient if the volume and talking speed were alright.

Finally, I began working on wire framing the app, making sure to back my design decisions up with psychological and gestalt principles like Fitt’s & Tesler’s laws, and the rules of scarcity and peak end. It important to me when creating a design that there is concrete evidence to back up what the user is looking at. Many modern designs I see people create are beautiful but from a functionality standpoint, they are way too complex and violate basic ux principles. When you have a working user like a nurse who is trying to juggle a lot of different tasks, a design that guides them through a process and offers few choices wins out over one that may appear more robust with all the ‘bells and whistles’.

DESIGN PHASE

Finally, it was time to sit down and create a working, full color prototype. I decided to go with a bright and inviting look that was scannable and easy to process. Nurses can feel in control of the entire translation process as the app always informs them of what ‘step’ of translation they are currently on. Additionally, AI is utilized to help nurses quickly identify the most important information a patient is saying, such as medication doses or pre-existing conditions, with the ‘Highlight Insights’ feature. They can also easily add relevant medical information right to a patients chart with the touch of a button.

FUTURE ITERATIONS

This project allowed me to explore an idea I had been thinking on for awhile and while I am generally happy with the results, there are a few things I would like to further explore in future iterations.

Further refine the device pairing process.
This is likely the most “complex” process users need to complete in the carevo app, and I feel like refining the pairing instructions to be a bit more detailed and explicit would result in fewer user errors and eliminate confusion before the the real purpose of the app has even been explored.
Implement more AI assistance functionality.
Carevo utilizes AI to help nurses filter out the most relevant patient information by highlighting the info and offering to add it to a patient chart via a checkbox. In the future, I would love to further define exactly how this function would work. Should nurses be able to edit/remove some of the highlighted info? How would nurses interact with this tool on a touchscreen?