Noticeably, it is commonly seen that importance is being placed on designing the User Experience of healthcare Design within the area of hospital business management. From the perspective of planning the whole user process that happens at the hospital, even considering the visitor or guardian's experience journey at the hospital is becoming crucial. Especially for the elders who visit the hospital as a patient or a visitor, appropriate information affordance for themselves to experience the procedure without the inconvenience is particularly demanded. Because the already-existing process regarding approaching certain medical treatment or proceeding hospital administrative work is sometimes an insurmountable barrier for them to deal with. 

 

Moreover, in South Korea’s big hospital like a university hospital, communication in the process of dealing with hospital administrative work contains a lot of issues. Particularly in talking between hospital administration counselors and the elders who are not familiar with the overall hospital procedure, the conversation does not go fluently and it takes a lot of time to persuade and make them understand. And it consequently leads to delay and affect the following customer’s work. Even in the research phase of this project, my team and I observed several argument-ish conversations between counselor and elderly customers about some hospital administrative procedures.

 

They frequently had some trouble understanding or misreading what counselors said even though it is such a necessary thing to hear for their medical process. Due to that they inevitably faced some arguments, and it eventually came to cause great inconvenience to the other customers. And, this situation is currently, actually happening in KUMC(Korea University Medical Center)’s administration section.  

 

Given these circumstances, we focused on investigating the intrinsic needs of individuals and redesigning the overall customer experience flow.

 

In planning a research strategy, we planned to do ethnographic research, which is observing and collecting an individual’s actual heuristic data from their activities. During several months of research at KUMC, we tightly observed how elderly customers communicate with hospital counselors and how they experience the administrative procedure in terms of user experience. Also, we conducted in-depth interviews with customers, counselors to share their thoughts about how they feel about the service experience. 

 

In the analyzing phase, KJ mapping and affinity diagram methodologies were utilized to sort out the data group we collected and clarify the core insights for the design solution. At the same time, we visually organized the customer journey map, persona, and UX algorithm in order to clarify the niche needs from a structural viewpoint. 

 

Based on several clarified key data and insights through the analyzing phase, in the final phase, I created 3 design solutions:

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1. Interior Renovation on KUMC Administration Center with clarified, simplified human traffic flow  

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2. Waiting Seats + Displayable Pillar that shortens the waiting time and intuitively helps customers to recognize the following procedure  

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3.Medical Guide Band + Printer Pad that resolves communication misreading between counselor and elderly customer. 

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UX Methodology-based User & Spatial Usability Research