Before beginning workshops with ALISS, Lauren and Sarah of Snook and Futuregov spent time with a variety of different people from around Scotland who self manage their long term conditions and/or provide helpful services to these people.
The research took them from Perth, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Kilmarnock.
Informal interviews were used to get to know and understand people, what their condition means and how they live with it. The skills and toolkit they used come from their service design backgrounds meaning observation, listening and visual thinking were key in the process.
The research didn’t focus solely on healthcare providers and services, it looked more holistically at people’s lives. We covered family and friends, day to day life, the technology or in the offline world, tools they use to gather information and connect with people to organise their lives. By having little agenda to interviews, valuable insights were gained, a big lesson in how listening can be beneficial over a questionnaire.
Journey mapping was used, a technique which visually maps a ‘users’ journey across a period of time, their interactions with various services along the way, and importantly how they felt at each stage. This allowed us to find low points in people’s journeys from pre diagnosis to post diagnosis and their journeys their after.
We worked with participants through ten statements focused around long term conditions, asking if they felt they were true or false. These helped us to identify key problems and pushed participants for concrete answers to the questions. We looked at people’s networks, which brought to attention the direct split (in most cases) between health care and personal care.
This research was conducted with a wide range of people varying in age and background, it became clear however that there were similar problems cropping up and by grouping together insights and problems found throughout the research, Snook found common occurrences and patterns in people’s experiences.
The ten insights we generated were used in the next process of development to lead workshop participants into an idea generation stage. It’s very difficult when developing ideas to try and fix everything, so the insights and questions were very valuable as starting points.
The next stage was the February 2010 workshops which you can read more about here, or the preparation which came before here.
