Overview
I conducted user interviews in collaboration with medical students on a design team who were re-designing the rolling IV pole stand. Insights from the interview confirmed some of the drawbacks of the current design including inconvenient size, weight, and maneuverability. I discovered the main use case for a rolling IV pole stand, which is when a patient in the hospital goes to the bathroom independently, and this influenced the design of the product.
This project was in response to a request for help from a design team at a medical school. They were working to understand the experience of walking with an IV pole and redesign the product, and reached out to the Open Source Medical Supplies community on Facebook.
I met with the team, and made a plan to conduct in-depth user research, which they could use to inform their redesign of the IV pole.
Background
The team at the medical school are working to “design a better patient experience walking with an IV after surgery,” given that walking soon after surgery is important for recovery. He and his team believe that the current design could use improvement.
In response to the Facebook post, former patients contributed feedback on the experience. Based on this feedback, the team is planning to “improve either the base, wheels, chords [sic], or balance to help facilitate patients walking.”
While the anecdotal evidence from members of the Facebook group is helpful for identifying which ways the current design might be unusable, collecting more data through ethnographic research and patient surveys will the team to better define the problem space before re-designing.
guiding Research Questions
1. Is the design of IV wheeled units usable for post-op patients to walk with?
2. Is the IV used for purposes it is not intended for, such as stability?
3. Do patients all have similar or different needs for walking with an IV?
Standard IV pole
Gantt chart with milestones
Research plan
Patient surveys
5-minute length survey will be used to quickly gather feedback on how usable wheeled IV units are, and to validate the patient demographic. Question types: identification, ranked questions, and short answer questions.
Ethnographic Research
5-10 semi-structured interviews with ambulatory people who are recovering or have recently recovered from surgery and had to walk with an IV.
insights
Unfortunately, this project was not completed due to new constraints on the design team which didn't allow for collaboration. Up until that point, I was able to conduct four interviews, and gather preliminary insights based on that data.
Validating the patient demographic
All four people I was able to interview had experience walking with an IV pole during an emergency room visit, not in recovery from surgery. I adjusted the interview questions accordingly, and planned to re-evaluate the guiding research questions.
Major takeaways:
1. Patients won't usually walk with an IV pole unless they needed to get up to go to the bathroom.
2. Patients are often physically tired, and have to continually decide whether to do things independently or ask for assistance from nurses.
3. Patients are frustrated with the fact that the IV pole is big, heavy, hard to roll, and that the wires and tubes get tangled.
Storyboard to communicate the major takeaways of the interviews
next steps, RECOMMENDATIONS, AND IMPACT
Although the initial focus of this research were patients recovering from surgery, during participant recruitment and interviewing, I found that ER patients have similar issues with wheeled IV units.
In a future version of this project, I would study the use of wheeled IVs in different hospital units (such as surgical or emergency). Then, I could use a survey to validate if there are multiple demographics, and if so, how their experiences are similar or different from each other.
Through this work, by improving the hospital experience, we can increase patient satisfaction and hospital performance.