PROJECT humansa:
Designing the clinic of the future
Create a holistic health and wellness service for mature elites in Hong Kong, with a vision to expand to the Greater Bay Area in the future.
The Ask
From one of Hong Kong and Mainland China’s largest property development and infrastructure companies, comes an ask to create a new holistic health and wellness service for mature elites in Hong Kong, with a long term vision to expand to the Greater Bay Area in the future.
Problem
The way healthcare currently works is to treat patients and address immediate concerns once they are discovered. But what happens to those who are not severely ill, and have the means to invest in preventative health in order to secure their futures? Longevity has always been a long sought after secret in many Asian cultures, and with Chinese people in particular believing that “wealth is health,” and increasingly finding that they have the resources to achieve optimal results, yet there is no service available to suit their needs. In fact, this audience base often finds that their scattered spending on health related products and services ends up costing much more time and money, and wonder why there is no consolidated ecosystem that can prevent them from repeating their story, and having to seek out different experts to address each facet of their health.
Solution
Design a “Clinic of the Future,” an integrated service that offers health and wellness facilities, treatments, and expertise (be it physical, mental, or psychological) so that they can maintain their health even into old age. At the same time, we must mind our client’s essential spatial and business constraints, best utilizing their existing assets (acquired entities, partnerships, and licensed experts) to develop such a service.
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DISCOVERY
Getting acquainted
Internally: get acquainted with the workflow, team composition, and timelines. Externally: get acquainted with stakeholders, relations, power dynamics. Extra-externally: get acquainted with partners and vendors
The outcome of an early stage discovery session with our clients to get to know, from their own voices, what it is that they need help on. Also for us to better gauge the scope of the project and for administrative/management to place team members with relevant expertise accordingly.
As a highly anticipated, large scale project, I knew this would be a great challenge and exciting opportunity for me to get acquainted with a process that would incorporate interdependent work streams - with an additional complexity that not all of this collaboration was in-house. In order to ship our product/service on time, this would require a very unique way of working where multiple teams are concurrently achieving their milestones while feeding into other teams’ outcomes. Here is the workflow visualized below:
A conceptualization of the kind of process we wanted to run: iterative cycles achieved in agile fashion with ongoing development alongside ongoing discovery.
A rough draft (some content removed for NDA) that applies the same process of work, with one level of detail deeper to explain how different work streams’ outcomes should feed into, and inform each other.
We realized early on that despite the client’s ambitious visions for the future, there were still a lot of blurry areas that, if left undefined, would not be shippable. So, first and foremost, we needed to set a direction and scope. Without a clearly defined valued proposition and target audience, the scope of the problem was way too broad and lofty to hold any substantial form.
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DISCOVERY
Workshopping and Consulting
We set out to first understand the market. Then, determine the prospective users, hence establishing a basic business strategy. Then, validate through research and iterate again, filling in more detail and refining each time, all the while keeping our clients in the loop about our ongoing progress so they can contribute and feel involved at every stage.
Competitive research (sample) into successful and/or known health and wellness services offered in Hong Kong.
I took the initiative to do some competitor research (pictured above) in order to gain a better sense of the landscape across current businesses within the health and wellness sector in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, we were concurrently scheduling meetings with the other vendors in order to understand each others’ roles and capabilities, and allow for smoother collaboration throughout the project.
This would usually involve a knowledge share-out, followed by Q&A. Although it was clear that they had much experience working with traditional clinical software and had many more advanced functions, too (i.e. wearable device integration, AI powered selfie scans, telemedicine etc.), what we also observed was that their interfaces could be made a lot more user-friendly, with branded aesthetics for a frictionless, enjoyable use. We also noted that there was not much coverage when it came to the more “lifestyle” niche of features you would see in modern wellness focused apps. More on why this is significant to come.
At the same time, we wanted to leverage upon some of the technology that our partner was capable of when considering scalability, so we kept this knowledge in our back pocket to draw back upon at a later stage of design.
Embracing friction
What we uncovered from our preliminary desk research and competitor exploration was that first of all, “health” and “wellness” were defined in a substantially different ways. Even from our initial thinking, it didn’t seem right to us that purely clinical medical services such as hospitals and treatment-based care could be categorized alongside self-instigated therapies such as spa sessions and yoga retreats - activities we would tend to associate with the term “wellness”. What we wanted to figure out was, however, where the concept of “health and wellness” fits into all of this.
How might we promote the active nature of a "wellness" lifestyle while leveraging the scientific credibility behind "health"?
How might we promote the active nature of a "wellness" lifestyle while leveraging the scientific credibility behind "health"?
Does health and wellness exist in a continuum or are they diametrically opposed? Is it possible to have a service that is medically preemptive and also routine-building? Are there existing practitioners who qualify to carry out two very different approaches to wellbeing? Is this viable, ethical, or even legally admissible for a business to integrate many different medicinal practices, yet each requiring their own regulations? I gathered some inspiration from other designers who have done work in the health and wellness sector to seek some answers:
Our team tried to work out a framework that could help us organize our thinking around target audiences and segments, pretty soon realizing that it was going to take more than just a couple hours of intense thinking and discussing. The health industry is not only complex, but intertwined with so many other sectors of society, different actors, and operating at varying scopes and scales, too. We would need to explore, research, and delve a lot deeper in order to come to our solution.
What we knew for certain, however, was that we could embrace this friction as an opportunity to find an exciting, new, never-before-seen solution.
What we knew for certain, however, was that we could embrace this friction as an opportunity to find an exciting, new, never-before-seen solution.
Brainstorming frameworks to conceptualize "health and wellness" - where might our solution be mapped?
Workshopping
Our clients also wanted us to host several workshops throughout the project. For us designers, workshopping held a specific purpose to bring all major stakeholders together at one time in one place (which is often very difficult to achieve), and collaborate intensely to allow the diverse group of attendees to generate a broad range of ideas. An ideal goal for workshops would be to also create consensus over key milestones and reach alignment. From the client’s perspective, they also wanted this to be a chance where key people could make their voices heard and establish a sense of importance and status within the group.
As a facilitator, I learned from my fellow design team members how to lead the conversation in such a way that could generate more discussion, whilst keeping everyone engaged and moving along in a timely manner. I learned that the art of steering discussions - which was so much more than just cueing people to speak — involved good timing, short term memory to rapid recall, reacting enthusiastically to build upon a topic, probing with brain teasing questions… all the while maintaining a comfortable atmosphere and efficient time use.
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RESEARCH
Real people, real insights...?
The complex and ever-changing nature of the healthcare industry makes it essential to undergo extensive research, especially because of the severity of impact for the service we execute in the end. Therefore, with real people’s health and lives at stake, there was no leeway to make uneducated decisions nor misconducts when it came to abiding by medical policies and procedures. We were strict on ourselves to always consulted medical experts for their advice and protocol validation when testing concepts. When researching our target users, we were also very careful about handling their sensitive information and clearly communicated that if for any reason the interviewees felt uncomfortable, they had the right to opt out or choose not to disclose.
As part of trying to envision the service, I illustrated some concepts of some of the interactions we might witness in the spaces allocated for them service.
After our workshop, some findings came more obvious and straightforward, but others took a bit of time to think through and discuss. An instance of the former: we would not be creating a service for families. Not only would this deepen the complexity of the medical expertise required, but even the physical space itself would have to include specific family-friendly facilities (i.e. safer equipment, parking for strollers, or even children's play area), and the lush, high end atmosphere that our client wanted to create would not be possible if small children were part of the clientele. It quickly became apparent to us that including families as the audience would actually deter some other target groups away because their needs would clash. But to get an even narrower focus, we knew research was necessary.
In addition to the quantitative findings from a vendor partner, we requested to have further in-depth, semi structured interviews with an sample of 8-10 survey respondents.
Here's a summary of our findings:
Space Design
As we came to a more concrete understanding of who our audience might be, we were concurrently thinking about how the overall service could come together, starting with the physical space that had been designed for the “Headquarters” of what would eventually work as a hub and spoke network of practitioners and centers, all across one connected ecosystem. We had some ideas about what principles the space should follow, after hearing from workshop attendees about how to best implement the service and what they’d like to see.
We also worked in partnership with the architecture firm who was in charge of the interior design to help best integrate our service guidelines with the space allocations they had available. After reviewing their floor plan and image renderings, we had some hunches about what might be improved (and what could not be changed), such as the need for areas with more privacy, and also a closer proximity between the physiotherapy and gym, since those departments would definitely have to work closely together to help the client on their fitness and wellbeing in a holistic way. However, we set up some more in-depth meetings to validate these assumptions further with the future head practitioners of physiotherapy and personal training.
Then, we turned these insightful conversations into refined spatial recommendations that we annotated and met up with the architects to discuss what could be improved.
One might notice that half of the space, which is dedicated to medical examinations and visiting the general doctor, requires no change. That is because we were compelled to respect the specific, protocol-passing and clinically approved way of working by medical practitioners, as well as the constraints of some equipment (i.e. x-ray and ultrasound rooms have specific requirements and setups that we would not interfere with). We did, however, determine a possible route/order of moving across the space based on our vision of the service being carried out. This is shown through the numbered annotations you will see here.
Initial renderings of the space, created by another fellow vendor hired by our client.
Rendering of the main lobby/reception.
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RESEARCH
Validating with Experts
Subject matter experts can provide valuable insights and knowledge about a particular industry or area of focus, which can help UX designers create more effective and relevant solutions for their users. For a medical project, this was even more crucial to get right, since the industry is necessarily strict, with high knowledge barriers for laymen like ourselves.
Further validations about our user journey and proposed service were sought from speaking with medical and wellness practitioners. Thanks to speaking with subject matter experts, we were able to refine the service to also meet their needs, requirements, and ways of working:
Semi-structured Q&As with discipline experts revealed finer amendments to our proposed offering, and helped us validate some assumptions.
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DISCOVERY
Pulling through with teamwork
In the end, we were able to pull together the efforts of various teams across strategy/research, UX/UI design, product management and tech to launch our final product. It was not easy, but we did it.
I even got a chance to practice my illustration skills, as a way for our clients, who were very visually receptive, to imagine how different parts of the service might show up…
My illustrations later served as concept designs for what would be a fully illustrated, animation video to introduce the service to our client’s upper management teams. With the combined efforts of my talented colleagues, here is the outcome, an introduction to the Humansa service (click the link to view on YouTube).
Feel free to play around with the prototype below:
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DISCOVERY 2.0
Still discovering
Learnings
(1) so your teammates can best complement and utilize you.
(2) Seek to understand the client and pivot quickly as needed. Be sensitive - sometimes you have to read between the lines.
(3) Different work, same team - it's important to be aligned internally first. If not, consequences may be severe and cause damage to both team dynamics and relationship with the clients.
