NCA Maternity Center - Reshaping a traditional industry with technology
Role & Responsibilities
• Role: Project lead / Duration: 3.5 months (2018-2019)
• As project lead, I am responsible for giving design direction, cooperating with engineering team from both front and back end to develop the app, oversee deliverable quality, give presentation and foster communication.
Project Background
With the ambition of becoming one the top maternity hospitals in China, chairman of New Changan Group believes it’s time to introduce the highest medical care quality to China. A small yet necessary part of the roadmap is providing digital services to their customers. As a first step, our goal is to help New Changan set up the infrastructure to revolutionize this traditional industry, apply technology to empower offline experiences and to enable continuous, seamless service with the official app.
Approach & Result
Research/User interview - Gain deep understanding on expectant mothers, mothers, fathers and their needs and pain points during pregnancy, labor and after pregnancy period.
Synthesis - Provide advise on app design strategy, in terms of short-term actionables, target users, function release priorities and long term goal.
Design - Create app structure/ information architecture, detail interaction flows.
Design - Create visual design based on existing brand language. We developed 2 visual directions, one expresses an organic/life-form style, the other is after a young/clean-edge style.
Takeaways
Human or machine, which focus can provide a better service?
This project was my first case in the medical industry, and it delightfully broadened my view in many ways. It’s not unusual for a project to have multiple stakeholders, but they rarely disagree on each other on a fundamental level. On this project, two key stakeholders shared very different point of views on “what is the definition of innovative hospital service“, this made the team reflect deeply on “what is the next generation of medical service?” Their point of views dictates the direction of the app design, for example, wether to be creative on online-offline integration, build interconnected systems rather than standalone systems, bring in e-commerce platforms, or, stick to the basic functions (appointments, information inquiry etc.), simply make sure the user experience is smooth and leave the rest to human hands. On the one hand, the Dean of hospital, in his late 60s, has travelled around the world to see how high-end hospitals operates, firmly believe in human service is the way to go; On the other hand, the construction/project director, in his late 30s, wishes to fully introduce internet into the ecosystem, this is how revolution is done. The debate was never resolved.
If you look at the whole picture, for a new hospital that is just about to open, the design of related digital platform is really at the bottom of the priority list, we ended up creating a design that steered away from being “too innovative” with basic function and good user experience, then, focused on the key service (maternity care) to bring fresh ideas online (for example, the mommy nest), targeting a younger generation, as the first step towards bringing internet services to this hospital. In the end, there’s no definite answer to whether a hospital should adopt more machine or human approach to their services, this depends on the scenarios where service is required, also, the cost of building the service must be taken into account. Bear in mind that a maternity center is different from medical hospital, there’s also potential to set up different tiers of service package, catered to various user journeys and customer preferences. In the long run, a project with such scale requires sophisticated planning and good supervision over execution for this to work.
Work done @ ARK Innovation Consulting / 2018-2019