With my third design team, the biggest challenges were designing our solution so it would be easy to use and not add too much time to a patient's hospital visit, generating understandable images, and figuring out how we were going to know if the patients actually understood the images our solution generated. User design relies on concepts from psychology and sociology, enabling us to better design a solution that will fit with what people already do and make it more likely they will start using this solution too. Understanding language was also relevant to the project. When you feed full sentences into an image generator, it usually does not produce an accurate, understandable and specific image. Using concepts from linguistics, which is the study of language, helped us figure out how to break medication instructions down from full sentences into smaller components that we could feed into an image generator in specific ways to improve the understandability of the images generated. This not only required my team and me to learn a little bit of linguistics, but it also required us to figure out how we were going to test the understandability of our images so we could improve how we generated the images. Through this project, I appreciated a principle that I had long taken for granted: patient-centered design. I began this journey attempting to simplify and define the concept of understanding in a vacuum. Over time, I realized I needed to operationalize the problem: systematically break down these concepts into smaller, observable outcomes that I could use to better understand and tackle the problem. In the process of operationalization, the patient was both the end user and the center of how we defined our solution from the start.
