Healthcare institutions are increasingly dedicating funding and research to address patients' social needs as part of treatment. UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations (CVP), Streetwyze, community organization leaders, and SOM Tech partnered to explore, "How might we create a way for community partner organizations to identify, recommend, and communicate resources to address their clients' social needs?"
Co-designing with Community Partners
When SOM Tech joined the team, CVP and Streetwyze were already underway working with community members in their neighborhoods to understand how they navigate their resource landscape.
Given the pandemic, further investigation was limited to remote interviews. Packets were mailed to participants to facilitate discussion. Encouraged by our CVP partners to frame questions for healthy dialogue around participants’ environments and what technology they have at home, we conducted a “digital adventure” exercise, role-playing scenarios and asked them to imagine how their phone could help them.
These collaborative exercises gave us an understanding of participants' barriers and pain points with technology. They also highlighted how technologies privilege certain experiences while dismissing those of the marginalized and oppressed.
Getting to know the people we were designing with helped us shape our problem statement and inclusive personas. Discovery efforts informed our pivot from putting a tool in the hands of community members, to integrating it into a community leader's workflow.
Prototyping and Usability Testing
As a team we began prototyping a digital tool with:
- Participant profiles to understand needs and recommend and share resources quickly based on location
- Inboxes to send bi-directional emails and texts
- Marketing campaigns to send templated information across multiple channels and segments
- Virtual community groups led by local community partners
Semi-structured usability interviews provided us with feedback on current tools used as well as feedback on the prototypes. We learned that the tool needs to be simple - community leaders are already burdened with varied systems - easy to use, and beneficial for participants to try it.
Our tactics all kind of tie back to listening, patience, and being flexible. This is what’s needed to have underrepresented voices be part of this process.
Tessa Cruz
Streetwyze
Solution
The prototypes ultimately became a digital tool built in Salesforce with a Twilio integration. The tool gives community leaders and members bi-directional texting capabilities, plus the ability to see participants’ information, resources, and messaging in one platform which allows for easy sharing and referencing. The tool also includes campaign functionality so community leaders can disseminate mass emails and texts to community members through segmentation.
Considerations and Lessons Learned
Remote interviews are hard. Having to rely on remote interviews to meet with community members during the discovery process added an extra challenge. Scheduling, technology barriers, varied patient populations, and finding the right tools contributed to our shift to gathering feedback from community leaders to help inform the discovery process.
Accurate content and ease of use are key. Maintaining current resources on a simple, easy-to-use platform was critical to increasing user adoption and building credibility. Leveraging existing relationships (e.g. between patients and community organizations) helped build trust in the process and product.
Keep participants and users at the forefront of each decision. Learning as much as you can about the people you are working and designing with – and using that knowledge to drive your design and build processes – will help ensure your tool aligns with the users’ needs and lives.
You should build the time and infrastructure from the beginning to prioritize these groups.
Anu Cemballi
UCSF's Center for Vulnerable Populations