We all know the health care system is broken, and that every aspect of the patient journey needs to be overhauled, optimized, and made tolerable (enjoyable might be asking too much). Unfortunately, the journey and daily activity for physicians, nurses, administrators, technologists, and schedulers needs the same level of change. Enhancing the patient experience cannot come at the expense of the physician or vice versa. That is why it is time to rethink and change the user experience for everyone in health care.
What is User Experience
The term user experience (UX) was coined in 1993 by Don Norman for his group at Apple Computers, a company that has continued to be a leader of UX with innovative products (eg, the iPod and iPhone). Although the term UX is widely known today, many people do not really know what it means or how it can be used. UX refers to the fact that every human has experiences with every product, service, or business with which they interact. The recent popularity of the term comes from companies being interested in understanding consumers’ experiences with their products and trying to engineer improvements.
Understanding and defining what is meant by UX requires understanding user-centered design (UCD) and design thinking. UCD leverages human factors and psychology to create great experiences businesses want for users and customers. The ultimate goal of UCD is to understand the current UX of a product or service and how to better produce a product or service that benefits the users. A user is not limited to the final person that uses it but anyone that interacts with it. Design thinking is a framework that UX designers can use to find solutions to problems regardless of how small or big.
Although UX, UCD, and design thinking may sound far afield from medicine, these concepts can be leveraged in any human endeavor to find new solutions to problems. Design thinking has a formal, structured framework that can be used by anyone—from a Fortune 500 company with hundreds of individuals finding a way to improve workflow to a small medical practice improving the scheduling process for their patients and staff.
For UX in health care, it is important to take into account every aspect of care that affects the patient including but not limited to physician education, patient education, care delivery, waiting rooms both real and virtual, scheduling, safety, the online experience, and so much more. We need a plan that is not thrust upon us, but instead is carefully designed by professionals – ourselves and our colleagues—to create optimized UX. Making it look good is waste of time. Making it less painful is insufficient. We are past that point. We need true UX to solve all too common real problems in health care.
