Woundification

User Research

We had 3 iterations of the interviews. We initially focused on new wounds but following the first round of interviews, I noticed few individuals require guidance on wound care treatment for new wounds. Interestingly, a majority of people express the need for guidance when their old wounds fail to cure on time (or within their expected duration so-to-speak). This discovery led us to pivot our initial design accounting for old wounds.

Interview - Version 1 (First Iteration)

User Research Objectives

Before designing the user research, we listed out the questions that need to be clarified.

• Do my users have impairments or disabilities to consider–whether temporary, situational, or permanent?

• How familiar are my users with technology?

• How are my users accessing the product or service?

• Where and when are my users accessing the product or service?

• Have I considered all my potential users?

To better understand the needs of users, we conducted a survey to figure out how people treat.

Demographic Information

Number of participants: 45

Gender: female (n=30 ); male (n=15)

Educational level: above high school

Age: 20-25 years old (n=25) ; above 25 years old (n=20)

Questions

• What wounds are you most likely to have?

• How it is usually treated?

• How often do you pay attention to the changes in the wound？

• Will you search online or download software?

• Have you ever had severe trauma?

• How did you treat it?

• What are the general questions for wounds?

• Do you carry coins with you?

• How often do you bring a phone charger with you when you go out?

• What is your phone model?

Conclusions

Measurement tool

• Few people bring coins and chargers with them all the time

Suggested Features(user’s need for this app):

1. Compare to new wounds, they more care about the healing condition of old wounds or continuous follow-up

2. Medication instructions

3. Anticipated time or timeline

4. Prevent the wound

5. Get rid of the scar

6. Skin allergy (treatment)

7. How to go to the nearby available hospital that covered medical insurance fee

8. Some of them don’t want to take pictures, they prefer to select similar pictures and make comparisons by themselves

9. Most of them don’t need wound identification functions, because they know how causes of wounds

10. Want to know what kind of other symptoms will be infected

11. How to treat my wounds if I use the wrong way to treat them at the beginning

12. Want to know more about invisible diagnosis

Diabetics:

1. Have great demand for reminder functions—— their nerves are insensitive so that they will get hurt unconsciously

2. Want to know more about invisible diagnosis

3. Based on wounds, the app can provide more information about their condition

4. Long-term tracking function

5. Provide diabetics with educational resources on wound care, including information on how to prevent and manage wounds

Interview - Version 2 (Final Iteration)

Demographic Information

Number of participants: 45

Gender: Female (n=30); male (n=15)

Educational level: Above the high school

Age: Age: 20-25 years old (n=25); above 25 years old (n=20)

Assumptions

1. Users who have failed to treat the wounds by themselves, want to know why is their wound(s) not cured or getting better.

2. Users who have failed to treat the wounds by themselves, and want to know how to cure them.

3. Users who have scars and want to get rid of them.

4. Users who have a chronic wound(s) try to avoid infection and inflammation-diabetics, and users of old age.

Objectives

We aim to find out what common problems users have when they treat the wound(s) by themselves and what demands they need after treating wound(s) inappropriately.

Questions

• How long does it take for a wound to heal?

• When do you think you need to search the information about the wound or go to the hospital

• If your wound doesn't heal on time, what would you do?

• What support do you want to receive during your healing time?

• What kind of questions do you always ask about your old wound (scar? inflammation?)

• Where do you get the information on wound treatment?

• How many problems do you think the suggestion part addressed?

Conclusions

Function:

1. It’s better to have the function of guidance of medication.

2. Details of why the system recommends this medicine to me.

3. I want to have a diverse combination of medications that I can choose.

4. I can’t find a big difference compared to Google research.

5. I want to have an online service, or simulated human service so as to enhance credibility. like you can list out the keywords I need to mention in the beginning, then I can type the content by myself. and the keywords will be extracted and analyzed by an AI system. So that many unnecessary steps can be omitted.

6. Typing long sentences is inconvenient, the voice input function is needed.

Experience

1. Poor experience. merely the standardized questions fail to convince me that the app truly takes all of my conditions into consideration. Diagnosis is not a standardized thing, the whole process overlooks too many personal conditions.

2. The result that the system gives is too general.

3. The way of information collection lack of credibility.

4. Your design should consider the psychological condition of patients.

Process

1. Lacking freedom: I have to follow the whole process and then get a result.

2. Several functions lack logic and connection.