Seattle Children's Hospital
Improving the waiting room and service experience of patients and families through human-centered design.
Clinical waiting room experiences are often accompanied by feelings of distress, trepidation, and boredom, especially for pediatric patients and families who are coping with cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Our project focused on helping Seattle Children's Hospital design a positive waiting room and service experience for the current waiting room, as well as for the new outpatient clinic at the Seattle Children’s Hospital, which is expected to open in 2022.
How might we create an experience that is engaging and supportive for pediatric cancer patients and families while they are waiting?
A playbook that serves as a reference when designing hospital facilities at Seattle Children's Hospital. The playbook contains insights from the research that was completed by our team, supplemented by a compilation of recommendations for how to create a human-centered waiting space. It also includes programmatic diagrams with layout recommendations; suggested furniture, amenities, and activities; and a checklist to help ensure that all design requirements are being met and users remain central to the design.
You can see a digital version of the playbook here.
We began our process by collaborating with several stakeholders to define business goals and scope the project. During this meeting, we realized the original scope from Seattle Children's was too large for our timeframe. As a result, we worked with our stakeholders to scope our project by creating a service design blueprint to identity which area of the patient experience we should focus on.
We created a service design blueprint showing the end-to-end experience for a typical pediatric cancer patient appointment. We found that there is a significant amount of wait time between appointments, as can be seen on the blueprint in the orange boxes. As a result, this blueprint helped us in scoping this project to focus on the waiting experience itself as it would provide the most opportunity for impact.
.jpg)
We started our research by interviewing and administering a baseline survey to seven SMEs to understand the challenges of the current waiting room through the lens of staff. Here's what we learned:
After meeting with subject matters experts and stakeholders, we had conversations with parents and used creative activities (drawing and MadLibs) to understand how children perceive the existing waiting room. Many of these key insights aligned with the information we gathered from the SME interviews. These were the needs we uncovered:
Seattle Children's gave us the creative freedom to design whatever we felt was best for the space, and because we had been working with several different stakeholders, there were different project expectations. This ambiguity was challenging as there were many directions we could go in. To navigate this, we held an ideation session where we thought of both short-term and long-term solutions. We wanted to focus our solutions on reducing wait times, providing positive distractions, and mitigating the spread of pathogens.
The Short-Term Solution
Comprehensive space plans that outline how users can flow through and interact with recommended amenities, products, and services in the current clinic and in the architectural plans for the future clinics.
The Long-Term Solution
A smart wristband that adds personalization to the waiting area, empowers a child to interact with their environment, and connects them with others in a form factor that is easily sanitizable.
Our team led a design workshop with a total of eleven stakeholders and patient family participants at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Our goal was to validate design requirements, user needs, and get everyone aligned on a solution and project expectations. These were our findings:
After our design alignment workshop, we made the decision to park the smart wristband idea and focus our attention on the design of the waiting room. Because construction will be an ongoing endeavor for Seattle Children’s Hospital for a number of years, we created a playbook for creating human-centered facilities and experiential designs that they may use for future reference.
Additionally, we created separate diagrams to articulate our layout recommendations for the current space.
A digital version of the playbook can be found here.
Below are some of the pages that can be found in the playbook. The playbook contains the information needed to create a patient and family centered space. We formatted the playbook to briefly cover our research insights and supplemented those insights with recommendations for the waiting area. Additionally, we included programmatic diagrams to communicate more detailed recommended amenities, interior design, and layout recommendations.
Working with Seattle Children's Hospital to redesign a space for pediatric cancer patients and their families was an emotional experience that constantly pushed me out of my comfort zone. This project forced me to think beyond pixels and translate user needs into a physical space, which required my team and I to adopt new methods for researching, evaluating, and communicating our designs. Additionally, we had to design for several users, including children with compromised immune systems, which required very thoughtful decision making. While navigating this project was challenging, I learned that collaboration, communication, and being willing to try new methods are the key ingredients to a successful project.
If I had more time, I would have gone through more rounds of evaluation, especially with children. Because we had limited access to kids, we relied heavily on feedback from parents. That said, I am proud of the work we've done and I look forward to continuing designing solutions that will impact people's lives.