Roos Voorend

PRE-LIFE

2017 - 2018 | Meaningful Interactions Lab | Leuven, Belgium

Team

Gynecologists, Endocrinologist, Psychologist, Midwife, UX/IU Designer, Developer, Movement Scientist, Innovation Manager, Senior UX Researcher, UX intern.

My role: UX researcher

Deliverables

Journey Map

Persona's

Slides and Presentation

Publications

Comparing Male and Female Experiences in IVF Treatment Using Journey Mapping

Design4Health - UK - September 2018

Creating a self-management app for couples receiving fertility treatment

IVF can be challenging for couples because of regular hospital check-ups, hormone treatment and insecurity about the outcome. It can have major psychological implications such as stress, depressions and relational problems.

Goal of this project was to develop an app for couples that are trying to get pregnant via IVF. The app gives advice about diet, physical activity, mental wellbeing and provides information about the treatment to support them and improve the outcomes of the treatment.

The effectiveness of the app is now being evaluated in a clinical trial.

Embryologist adding sperm to egg in labo

Approach

Generative research

To learn about the experience of couples during IVF treatment we used surveys and conducted contextual in-depth interviews. To really understand their context, the interviews took place at participant's homes.
To better understand the context of the couples, we did observations of interactions between caregivers and patients and we did interviews with caregivers.

Evaluative research

We worked together closely with the design team and did usability testing with an early version of the app to guide the development process.

Process

Preparation

We crafted survey questions and an interview guide based on the the four area's of the project: diet, physical activity, mental wellbeing and the treatment itself.

Recruitment

17 patients were recruited via a patient organization for couples receiving fertility treatment and via the fertility clinics in two hospitals in Belgium (UZ Leuven and UZA).
11 caregivers were recruited via fertility clinics of two hospitals in Belgium (UZ Leuven and UZA).
10 patients were recruited for usability testing from the sample of participants.

Analysis

After transcribing the interviews, we wrote down important insights on post-its and clustered them using affinity diagramming. Using these insights we reconstructed the patient experience for both males and females during IVF treatment in journey maps and I created a presentation with the insights, highlighting them with quotes from participants and implications for the design of the app.

Main findings

Some insights that impacted the design are:

Couples are insecure about how they should administer and store their medication.
They would like more information about diet and physical activity in relation to the treatment.
Because of insecurity and questions patients have, they start looking for answers online where they find information that is not always reliable. Therefore, they would like to have all information about the treatment in one place.

Post-script

Joys

Doing observations in the lab was exciting.
Supervising a UX intern.
Being invited into people's homes and listening to their stories.

Challenges

Working in an interdisciplinary project can be challenging as some project partners were not familiar with design research methods and a generative research approach.
Not having a medical background, interviewing gynecologist and midwives with many years of experience in the field was challenging.
Getting access to caregivers for participation in the study was challenging because of their limited availability.

Learnings