Healthcare professionals who care for newborns must regularly complete a course in neonatal resuscitation. Together with a leading authority in the field, Laerdal was developing a new course where learners train on a manikin and get precise real-time feedback on their psycho-motor skills.
This was a new product, so the team needed to understand the clinical context and the subject matter well enough to reach concept maturity before development.
- Design research: interviews and workshops with SMEs and clinicians, resulting in a design brief, affinity diagrams and UX maps
- Cross-functional concept development and co-creation, from rough mindmaps, to detailed user journeys, to specific UI concepts
- Built functional prototypes in code (JavaScript, WebBluetooth, WebUSB) with live visual and audible feedback from the sensorized manikin
- User testing with learners and educators through multiple rounds
- Useful feedback, early. Functional prototypes delivered detailed, realistic test feedback in a project where low-fidelity testing would not have provided the necessary insight.
- A solid foundation. My prototypes were reused across several rounds of user testing.
- A communication tool. In a complex organization with many stakeholders, the prototypes made product ideas tangible.
The Task
Our team was tasked with developing a new product: a neonatal CPR course for doctors and nurses. The equipment included a sensorized manikin and several types of ventilation devices. Our team worked both on software and hardware parts of the product.
We needed to understand the clinical context and the subject matter well enough to reach concept maturity before development.
💡 Process: design research → concept development → prototyping → user testing and interviewing
Design Research
Together with a learning specialist and a medical specialist, I conducted interviews and workshops resulting in a design brief and a number of visualizations. This affinity diagram gave our small team the direction for concept development work. I produced various kinds of UX maps as well.
Affinity diagram — one of deliverables that came out of the initial design research.
Concept Development
After the research was finished and presented, I led cross-functional teamwork and co-creation. Our team worked on different levels of granularity — from rough mindmaps to detailed user journey maps to concepting specific UI elements.
Concept Development Process
A detailed user journey timeline
We made several user journey diagrams for a number of potential scenarios.
First rough concepts of different live feedback options
Prototyping
Our approach
My proposal was to use functional prototyping as the most effective approach for this particular product. We needed to learn about the user experience of both software (training course) and hardware (manikin and ventilation equipment), and the software/hardware interaction.
The precision of the experience matters a lot in this particular case. While a learner ventilates the manikin, the system gives live feedback to a learner via the laptop. That included visual and audible feedback. The experience of that live feedback was an especially important topic in our project.
A welcome screen of our course prototype (the software part)
Technology
The prototypes were built largely by me. We used JavaScript, HTML, CSS and connected the devices (sensorized manikin and ventilation devices) via WebBluetooth and WebUSB. That allowed the prototypes to provide real-time visual and audible feedback in response to ventilating.
We tested multiple concepts and addressed several hypotheses.
With these prototypes our team exceeded the company's expectations because:
- The prototypes were built in a short time and without involving any developers;
- We were able to test key features very early, in a project where low-fidelity testing would not provide the necessary level of insight.
Hardware
Hardware prototyping was also a part of the project. Another designer was responsible for it, but I took part in defining the requirements.
A prototype of a training station (the hardware part)
User testing
User testing was done with different user groups — learners and educators (subject matter experts).
Testing some of the live graph versions
“This is better than anything we’ve ever had for sure.”
Sometimes you really need a functional prototype
- I argued that this project needs a realistic prototype UX in order to gather useful user feedback. That UX included the critical feature of live feedback from the device. The bet paid off. Our functional prototyping approach proved very productive and allowed us to get a realistic and detailed feedback from our test participants.
- Through this process we drew conclusions on several hypotheses and scoped the work for the next iterations. The project then continued with more iterations of concepts and more user testing based on the prototypes that I made.
- This project existed in a complex organizational structure and involved a lot of stakeholders. Our team's prototyping work has been very helpful in communication with them and served as a very tangible and helpful illustration of product ideas.