PART A – Learning about Healthcare: A Consumer’s Initial Journey

Part A reveals an everyday person’s search for health information to resolve questions and inform themselves about conditions they experience, health issues, and disease prevention. The orientation will be that of individual sensemaking – the health seeker or consumer has a life and real interests which guide their health journey, and they make sense of all their life concerns together when information seeking. Their health information exploration is process of making sense of their experience and available resources, including materials from the web, health professionals, and family/friends, to answer critical questions.

Each Part overview presents a visual reference model of the personas, their issues and exploration paths. These could be color-coded for the book to show the transition from consumer to patient, and from student-resident-doctor, and the intersections of all these journeys.

Ch 2. Giving People What They Want: A Health Consumer’s Experience

The chapter starts by (visually) portraying the journeys initiated in the Part A overview. Two or three consumer scenarios illustrate the health concerns, information sought, decisions made, and interactions encountered. Switching between the patient’s up to the designer’s, I locate design and process innovation opportunities that were realized and missed, and the emergence of innovations that address these consumer problems.

This chapter ends with a mapping of health consumer problems and common needs to innovative processes that have emerged to serve these needs. (Examples: Executive healthcare tracking and online wellness summaries provided as special benefits, which will filter down into consumer applications; Grocery store clinics for inexpensive ambulatory care, which signify a new trend in care as consumption.)
The role of consumer website services is significant, though not the only focus here. We could focus on the evoltuion of a a major health site (to show how changes occur to meet changing consumer needs). We include a mapping of major health websites mentioned in the text, and show how they cover popular health needs, their overlap, and the kinds of applications or integration missing in this assessment.

Design process features: Adapting scenario design and customer foresight methods.
Design lesson: Consumer health websites evaluated by effectiveness. We illustrate the pivotal design decisions made in each site for consumer usability, IA/content design, and search/findability.