UXPA - UX in Healthcare
This month's remote UXPA meeting focused on UX in healthcare.
We enjoyed two talks, the first focused on UX in Pharma and the second on how design can help with health behavioural change.
Filippa Vajda and Voila Gkatzidou from AstraZeneca started us off with a very honest talk on the challenges and obstacles you can come across working in pharma.
As they said working in pharma is really important especially at a time like now, helping to keep us all healthy, and is full of opportunities to make an impact and improve peoples lives.
But they were careful to make sure we understood the challenges they face too, some of which people in other industries will also be aware of, for instance the use of legacy systems and rules round patient recruitment for research.
They finished off by telling us about some of the lessons they have learnt and how it has improved their process.
We then had Rosie Webster give us some top tips and a simple framework to help design for health behaviour change.
She started off by talking about what behaviour change is and why you might want to do it. But also reminded us that it is really hard.
Many of us are aware of nudge design - where you make it easier to make a small change, but most behaviour change is much more complicated than this, so she went through a framework with us to show all the things that need to be considered while designing behavioural change.
My biggest take away was how important understanding the problem is. If you do not fully understand the problem you are trying to solve you will not be able to design a solution that works.
For instance if designing to get people to do more exercise you have to consider that it is not just about willpower but also having the money for a pair of trainers and living near to a place where you can exercise, be that a park or other safe environment.
These were really interesting talks, but I have to say it made me glad I do not work in healthcare!