Welcome to my first professional UX experience. For half a year I was part of a UX team of four UX researchers and five UX designers at Curalie. I supported the team in their daily work and learned a lot.
After learning the basic methods and tools, I focused on my own project, which will soon be my bachelor's thesis.
The Provision of Information
One feature of the Curalie app was a symptom check. It is an automatically generated questionnaire that helps the user determine what health condition or disease their symptoms may be related to and what triage is recommended. This is based on an AI algorithm.
After you enter your initial symptoms, you have to answer follow up questions based on your input. The triage level and the possible diagnosis are displayed on the result screen.
I wondered:
"Do people trust a possible diagnosis and triage recommendation generated by artificial intelligence?"
When I did a scoping review, one of the things I found was that providing explanations and information is an important factor for a user to trust the results of a AI-based symptom check (SC).
User-Centered Design
I structured my work according to the User-Centered Design (UCD) process as it is a common philosophy in the area of UX and provides a variety of methods. It places the user into the center of the design process. [1]
User Research
Note: The insights used for the following methods are based on prior user research of the UX team and the results of the literature review.
The first step in the UCD process is to understand:
"Who is the user?"
"What is the user's goal?"
"What would the user do to achieve the goal?"
A Persona represents a specific group of users. For example 'Julia', (see figure below) is not a real person, but rather a symbolic figure of a target user with the characteristics described. It is not one specific user, but a summary of many users with different needs. A persona helps to empathise and understand the user's needs and circumstances. [2]
Julia's goal is to find out, if she should see a doctor based on her current symptoms.
She is a digital native and has a basic trust in digital products. She does not want to make an appointment unless it is necessary. An application that could help her achieve her goal should provide trustworthy results.
In a User Journey Map visualises the user's process (here of persona 'Julia') to reach their goal. It contains the actions, that need to be taken, as well as occurring emotions, thoughts, needs and pains. From this, opportunities can derived. [3]
User Requirements
One of the most important parts of UCD is the determination of user requirements, as they are the basis of the actual design. The goal is to translate user requirements into expressive needs. [4]
In this case, the opportunities found in the user journey map and the results of a literature review are taken into account. As a result, three requirement statements were defined from the user perspective:
"As a user, I need background information, in order to know that the technology is trustworthy"
"As a user, I need a transparent diagnosis process, in order to know that it does not act randomly"
"As a user, I need a understandable result and recommendation, in order to reach my goal of making an informed decision of the further treatment of my condition"
Usually the opportunities to meet user needs are derived from the defined user requirements. Here, the approach was different, due to the fact that no specific user tests were conducted to identify requirements related to trust. Although user requirements were found in the literature review, suggestions have been included here to better summarise and and compare both sources of research.
What's next...
The next article will cover the other two steps of the UCD process, design concept and design evaluation.
Literature used in this article:
[1] Lowdermilk T., ”User-Centered Design”, O ́Reilly Media, Inc. 2012.
[2] Miaskiewicz T., Kozar K.A., ”Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes?”, Design Studies, 32(5), pp. 417-430, 2011.
[3] Nielsen Norman Group, ”Journey Mapping 101”, available under: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/ , last access: 30.08.2023.
[4] ”Ergonomie der Mensch-System-Interaktion: Teil 210: Menschzentrierte Gestaltung interaktiver Systeme”, DIN EN ISO 9241-210, DIN-Normenausschuss Ergonomie (NAErg), Mrz. 2020.