Delft Design Guide: Digital Health

Plan your digital health design project

This section can help you see the big picture and build design leadership.

Process

Learn how you can manage the digital health process

Tips

Learn stakeholders, challenges and strategies

The information of this page is based on:

1. Wang, T., Zhu, H., Qian, S., Giunti, G., Goossens, R., & Melles, M. (2024). Designing digital patient experiences: The digital health design framework. Applied ergonomics, 119, 104289.

2. Wang, T., Qian, S., Zhu, H., Goossens, R., Giunti, G., & Melles, M. (2022, November). Building Understanding of Experience Design in Digital Health: Preliminary Results Based on Semi-Structured Interviews. In International Conference on Healthcare Systems Ergonomics and Patient Safety (pp. 317-331). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Process

Steps

Meet your clients and design team (if any) to discuss your design tasks and project requirements. Design tasks could be very specific or super broad:

Completing a specific design task
Addressing a daily problem
Improving the patient experience.

Project requirements need clarification early on:

Expected project duration, cost, and stakeholders
User, technical, legal, and business requirements
Risks, ethical, and technical constraints

Here is a task and requirement template.

A plan gives you and your stakeholders a comprehensive understanding of project complexity and provides you with a dialogue that breaks down divisions. To make your own project plan, start with:

Building your team.
Considering time management.
Distributing design tasks.
Determining methodology
Setting milestones and indicators.

You can use tools such as Miro, Notion, gantt chart to create your project plan.

Tips

At this stage, you need to involve:

Clients: purchasers and managers, hospitals, businesses, or the public sector.
Designers: UX designers, engineers, programmers, medical, policy, and marketing experts.

Other optional stakeholders…

Users: healthcare providers who utilize digital health systems as work tools to deliver care services, and patients who receive care services.
Others: some stakeholder groups (e.g., insurance companies) did not actively participate in the design process directly, their potential influence on future collaborations was acknowledged and considered.

At this stage, you might meet challenges…

Contextual Challenges refer to healthcare system challenges a designer should consider prior to fieldwork. Includes adapting to complexity, dealing with documentation, and attuning to restrictions.
Managerial Challenges refer to the collaborative atmosphere a designer should create throughout the whole design process. Includes managing relations, building understanding, and communicating design value.

Other potential challenges…

Practical Challenges: reaching agreements, involving end-users, and making design decisions. These refer to a prescriptive action for a designer to take when working in the field.
Commercial Challenges: providing evidence, implementing solutions, and establishing business models. These refer to a business value for a designer to add at the end of the design process.

DS1/DS2/DS3/DS4/DS6/DS7

You can address the above challenges by using…

DS1: Embrace a holistic perspective and system thinking through a literature review and market analysis.
DS2: Establish an actionable plan with clear milestones. Structured, adjustable, and measurable steps will help you track and reflect on your progress effectively.
DS3: Foster visionary and strategic design leadership and authority. Empower your team with design thinking and align your design approaches with long-term project goals.
DS4: Promote collaboration and co-creation inclusively and with empathy. Include your collaborators and stakeholders, listen to their stories, observe their behaviors, and uncover their needs.
DS6: Make visualizable, tangible, and testable designs. Communicating visually and making things tangible and testable can help you gather feedback and validate ideas.
DS7: Utilize storytelling techniques. Incorporate examples and metaphors to effectively convey a message to your target users and engage them emotionally.

Other potential strategies…

DS5: Emphasize iteration (iterate within a phase, between phases, or across phases). You can continuously improve and refine your design by embracing an iterative design process.
DS8: Prioritize equitable experiences. Have you heard about the Buckets Effect. Listening to different voices, balancing diverse needs, and providing a comparable experience for multiple stakeholders will help you reduce implementation obstacles.

Steps

To identify design problems and uncover design opportunities, conducting desk or field research is recommended:

Desk research, literature review, and market analysis
Observations, interviews, questionnaires, and co-creation

Notably, you do not always need to take all recommended design steps; instead, using your design intuition may help you speed up.

Potential outputs could be:

See it, say it, and solve it". You can frame and prioritize the design problem and generate an overarching design goal by using methods like:

Self-inquiry
Group discussion
Co-creation

Our webpage Understand Patient can help to facilitate this step.

Here is a design problem and design goal template.

Tips

At this stage, you need to involve:

Users: healthcare providers who utilize digital health systems as work tools to deliver care services, and patients who receive care services.
Designers: UX designers, engineers, programmers, medical, policy, and marketing experts.

Other optional stakeholders…

Clients: purchasers and managers, hospitals, businesses, or the public sector.
Others: some stakeholder groups (e.g., insurance companies) did not actively participate in the design process directly, their potential influence on future collaborations was acknowledged and considered.

At this stage, you might meet challenges…

Contextual Challenges refer to healthcare system challenges a designer should consider prior to fieldwork. Includes adapting to complexity, dealing with documentation, and attuning to restrictions.
Practical Challenges: reaching agreements, involving end-users, and making design decisions. These refer to a prescriptive action for a designer to take when working in the field.
Managerial Challenges refer to the collaborative atmosphere a designer should create throughout the whole design process. Includes managing relations, building understanding, and communicating design value.

Other potential challenges…

Commercial Challenges: providing evidence, implementing solutions, and establishing business models. These refer to a business value for a designer to add at the end of the design process.

DS1/DS2/DS3/DS4/DS5/DS6/DS7/DS8

You can address the above challenges by using…

DS1: Embrace a holistic perspective and system thinking through a literature review and market analysis.
DS2: Establish an actionable plan with clear milestones. Structured, adjustable, and measurable steps will help you track and reflect on your progress effectively.
DS3: Foster visionary and strategic design leadership and authority. Empower your team with design thinking and align your design approaches with long-term project goals.
DS4: Promote collaboration and co-creation inclusively and with empathy. Include your collaborators and stakeholders, listen to their stories, observe their behaviors, and uncover their needs.
DS5: Emphasize iteration (iterate within a phase, between phases, or across phases). You can continuously improve and refine your design by embracing an iterative design process.
DS6: Make visualizable, tangible, and testable designs. Communicating visually and making things tangible and testable can help you gather feedback and validate ideas.
DS7: Utilize storytelling techniques. Incorporate examples and metaphors to effectively convey a message to your target users and engage them emotionally.
DS8: Prioritize equitable experiences. Have you heard about the Buckets Effect. Listening to different voices, balancing diverse needs, and providing a comparable experience for multiple stakeholders will help you reduce implementation obstacles.

Other potential strategies…

DS5: Emphasize iteration (iterate within a phase, between phases, or across phases). You can continuously improve and refine your design by embracing an iterative design process.
DS8: Prioritize equitable experiences. Have you heard about the Buckets Effect. Listening to different voices, balancing diverse needs, and providing a comparable experience for multiple stakeholders will help you reduce implementation obstacles.

Steps

You are expected to provide solutions to the pre-defined problem. Seeking inspiration from different sources and co-designing with different people will be helpful.

Brainstorming
Co-creation
Prototyping (wireframe)

Our webpage Understand Patient can help to facilitate this step.

Here is a design guideline checklist.

You are expected to provide evidence-based and validated solutions. Using yourself, your colleagues, or stakeholders as experts to assess and prioritize your design concepts against pre-defined evaluation criteria, such as usefulness:

Self-evaluation
Agile test
User test
Usability test

Our webpage Evaluate Experience can help to facilitate this step.

Here is an evaluation plan and an evaluation checklist template.

Tips

At this stage, you need to involve:

Designers: UX designers, engineers, programmers, medical, policy, and marketing experts.
Users: healthcare providers who utilize digital health systems as work tools to deliver care services, and patients who receive care services.

Other optional stakeholders…

Clients: purchasers and managers, hospitals, businesses, or the public sector.
Others: some stakeholder groups (e.g., insurance companies) did not actively participate in the design process directly, their potential influence on future collaborations was acknowledged and considered.

At this stage, you might meet challenges…

Contextual Challenges refer to healthcare system challenges a designer should consider prior to fieldwork. Includes adapting to complexity, dealing with documentation, and attuning to restrictions.
Managerial Challenges refer to the collaborative atmosphere a designer should create throughout the whole design process. Includes managing relations, building understanding, and communicating design value.

Other potential challenges…

Practical Challenges: reaching agreements, involving end-users, and making design decisions. These refer to a prescriptive action for a designer to take when working in the field.
Commercial Challenges: providing evidence, implementing solutions, and establishing business models. These refer to a business value for a designer to add at the end of the design process.

DS1/DS2/DS3/DS4/DS5/DS6/DS7/DS8

You can address the above challenges by using…

DS1: Embrace a holistic perspective and system thinking through a literature review and market analysis.
DS2: Establish an actionable plan with clear milestones. Structured, adjustable, and measurable steps will help you track and reflect on your progress effectively.
DS3: Foster visionary and strategic design leadership and authority. Empower your team with design thinking and align your design approaches with long-term project goals.
DS4: Promote collaboration and co-creation inclusively and with empathy. Include your collaborators and stakeholders, listen to their stories, observe their behaviors, and uncover their needs.
DS5: Emphasize iteration (iterate within a phase, between phases, or across phases). You can continuously improve and refine your design by embracing an iterative design process.
DS6: Make visualizable, tangible, and testable designs. Communicating visually and making things tangible and testable can help you gather feedback and validate ideas.
DS7: Utilize storytelling techniques. Incorporate examples and metaphors to effectively convey a message to your target users and engage them emotionally.
DS8: Prioritize equitable experiences. Have you heard about the Buckets Effect. Listening to different voices, balancing diverse needs, and providing a comparable experience for multiple stakeholders will help you reduce implementation obstacles.

Steps

You are almost there! Collaborate with graphic designers, engineers, or programmers to finalize your product, and don't forget to double-check its usability.

Teamwork
Usability test

Considering the business model earlier can help you onboard your end-users and show your work to the real world smoothly at this stage. Don't lose connections with your clients, and be prepared for follow-up maintenance and iteration:

Collect end-users' feedback
Monitor system usage data

Tips

At this stage, you need to involve:

Clients: purchasers and managers, hospitals, businesses, or the public sector.
Designers: UX designers, engineers, programmers, medical, policy, and marketing experts.

Other optional stakeholders…

Users: healthcare providers who utilize digital health systems as work tools to deliver care services, and patients who receive care services.
Others: some stakeholder groups (e.g., insurance companies) did not actively participate in the design process directly, their potential influence on future collaborations was acknowledged and considered.

At this stage, you might meet challenges…

Contextual Challenges refer to healthcare system challenges a designer should consider prior to fieldwork. Includes adapting to complexity, dealing with documentation, and attuning to restrictions.
Managerial Challenges refer to the collaborative atmosphere a designer should create throughout the whole design process. Includes managing relations, building understanding, and communicating design value.
Commercial Challenges: providing evidence, implementing solutions, and establishing business models. These refer to a business value for a designer to add at the end of the design process.

Other potential challenges…

Practical Challenges: reaching agreements, involving end-users, and making design decisions. These refer to a prescriptive action for a designer to take when working in the field.

DS1/DS2/DS3/DS4/DS5/DS6/DS7/DS8

You can address the above challenges by using…

DS1: Embrace a holistic perspective and system thinking through a literature review and market analysis.
DS2: Establish an actionable plan with clear milestones. Structured, adjustable, and measurable steps will help you track and reflect on your progress effectively.
DS3: Foster visionary and strategic design leadership and authority. Empower your team with design thinking and align your design approaches with long-term project goals.
DS4: Promote collaboration and co-creation inclusively and with empathy. Include your collaborators and stakeholders, listen to their stories, observe their behaviors, and uncover their needs.
DS5: Emphasize iteration (iterate within a phase, between phases, or across phases). You can continuously improve and refine your design by embracing an iterative design process.
DS6: Make visualizable, tangible, and testable designs. Communicating visually and making things tangible and testable can help you gather feedback and validate ideas.
DS7: Utilize storytelling techniques. Incorporate examples and metaphors to effectively convey a message to your target users and engage them emotionally.
DS8: Prioritize equitable experiences. Have you heard about the Buckets Effect. Listening to different voices, balancing diverse needs, and providing a comparable experience for multiple stakeholders will help you reduce implementation obstacles.