App Design for Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Patients 

Team: SzuYing Ching, Christina Noonan, Courtney Garland, Zhuanyi Huang, SeungCheol Lee, JM Downey

Duration: 12 weeks

Personal Contribution: User Interviews, Research Analysis, Business Strategy, Ideation, Concept Test, Usabilty Test, UI Design

Final Deliverables- app design concepts supported by research, aligned with business strategy

Our final deliverables includes a research report about our target user, business strategy, app features, clickable prototype and execution table. 

 

The Design Process

 
 

1. Organizing kick-off meeting

At the first kick-off meeting with stakeholders, we came up with 4 activities to help us understand the project scope from various perspectives, stakeholder expectations. And we created 4 charts to gather requirements from each activity. 

  • General Project Scope
  • Stakeholder Map
  • Exercise: What does it mean to win?
  • Candidate questions for in-depth interviews.
 
 

2. Defining design problem

We worked for the innovation team of a top cancer hospital in the U.S. Our client came to us with the request to develop an app for their teenage and young adult patient. 

Through comprehensive user research, we defined our design problem as: 

How might we design a mobile application

for teenage and young adult patients that

provides a sense of connection to their community of peers,

speak to the needs associated with their life stage

and supports their treatment? 

3. Generating empathy on users through in-person interviews

To understand the life, we conducted both phone and on-site interviews with different stakeholders including hospital staffs, patients and their caregivers. The interviews brought us tons of authentic stories. These helped us to understand their lives with cancer, their feelings, and struggles; and in turn we developed deep empathy.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Transforming research into design

In order to transform this huge amount of information into meaningful findings to further inform our design, we cluster our interview notes according to three main stakeholders:

  • patients
  • families
  • hospital
 

5. Defining design rinciples

 
 
 

6. Business Strategies

Designers are judged by the quality of the ideas they generate. Having the ability to generate good ideas, ones that are strategically relevant and uniquely distinct is the goal.  We employed the method we call the continuum. It helped us define better ideas that led to a number of distinguishable strategies.

 

 

7. How we linked strategy with design?

We generated comparative design concepts according to three distinguished strategy we have. And we tested the concepts with users in the hospital.