Marty Gage Keynote

Uncovering the Emotional Journey for the Ideal Patient Experience

Meaghan Hudak, Reading time: 4 minutes

Whenever we conduct user research in health care, the same pain points consistently emerge. The experience tends to be overwhelming, confusing, frustrating, and stressful. This is because it’s hard to understand, and the process of getting care is often inefficient — health care has usability issues. 

Ideally, people want to feel in control. They desire health care that is straightforward and easy to understand, and want this care to be delivered through a convenient process. 

This presentation shared learnings of how patients define the ideal health care experience and focus on a user-driven definition of health care usability.  

Attendees learned how patients define the ideal health care experience, and to focus on a user-driven definition of health care usability.

The Healthcare Experience Today 

Marty starts us off by assessing the current healthcare experience. People find themselves in moments throughout the patient journey. It is not always a fluid experience. 

All of the research reveals a similar emotional outcome:

• Should I seek care?
• What’s my condition?
• What should I expect?
• What are my treatment options
• How should I manage my condition?
• Am I doing it right?

Touchpoints throughout a users journey includes: people, devices, apps, websites, medication. Touchpoints can be confusing. The current experience is the emotional outcome that results from the interaction between a person and something. Users can be stressed and overwhelmed making it difficult to make decisions, follow procedures and understand complex information. We learn that there's a fundamental usability issue with the healthcare experience. 

The Desired Healthcare Experience 

What is the desired healthcare experience? Marty explains that we need to dive into to people's emotions, benefits, features and sensor cues. If we define a desired patient experience it would be the emotional outcome people desire when interacting with the touchpoint.

The benefits would provide people with positive emotions of being calm and in control. Staying informed with easy to understand information. The sensory cues would have information: 

• All in one place
• Minimal steps
• Easy to navigate
• Up-to-date
• Simple language
• Concise
• Visual

The Solution

Marty asked us to assume we have a usability challenge. We are to treat moments as use cases and to think holistically about the use cases. Keep in mind the contextual/emotional, physical, cognitive, and desired outcomes.

We learn that touchpoints are the solutions in the moment. It is important to keep key touchpoints discreet and focused with a clear architecture and hierarchy. We should involve users in determining how the information is delivered and to test for usability

The Healthcare Usability Challenge 

We are shown complex information and depending on the situation, stress can limit comprehension. Marty left us with these tips:

• Embrace easy to understand

• Design for the big picture

• Right touchpoints for the right moments

• Involve users in the design

• Use information design best practices

• Test ideas for usability

“Even baseline or bad experiences in CPG or retail would be viewed as huge wins in healthcare. There’s so much opportunity to flip the script and impact the entire experience along the way.”

Sara Saldoff, OhioHealth

If you missed Marty’s presentation, check out the transcript and recording on the CCSQ World Usability Day page. This page also includes an archive of transcripts and recordings of speaker presentations, session materials, and event photos. For more information about the Human-Centered Design Center of Excellence, refer to the HCD CoE Confluence page.