User Experience Research
January 2019 - April 2019
Overview
InheRET, a startup that currently operates out of Michigan Medicine, is a cancer-risk evaluation tool that aims to empower patients and physicians to quickly identify their genetic risk factors for heritable diseases. For my final semester at the University of Michigan School of Information, I had the privilege of working with InheRET with a fellow classmate to evaluate the tool, help remove barriers to tool completion, and develop recommendations regarding ways to improve the patient experience of filling out the tool. After meeting with our stakeholders to understand their goals and reviewing the existing survey data available, we determined our core research question: Where and why do patients struggle with the InheRET tool?
Method
To pursue our research with InheRET, we focused on two main methods: Cognitive Walkthroughs and a Focus Group with a Participatory Design method called Magic Screen. Magic Screen allowed us to understand the most important information surrounding the family history topic, as well an ideal feature set surrounding the family tree build, as participants explain their screens. We chose these methods because both are useful for uncovering the problems that users are currently facing the the family-tree construction part of the InheRET tool, as well as mental models behind how our participants understand and think about a particular topic - in this case, family histories.
Analysis
To make sense of the information gathered from the Focus Group, we used Affinity Mapping to make sense of the overall information from both the group and individual sessions at large. Examples of high-level themes include fear (surrounding privacy of medical information), frustrations and needs (with giving medical health histories), and motivations (to give the information in the first place). These findings helped us to determine the final themes and recommendations in this report.
Results
Overall we found three core areas for improvement with the InheRET tool:
People are often aware that a family member has a health issue, but with variable degrees of precision, so we recommend the tool includes flexible options (ability to input information not directly tied to a person)
Especially with effort-intensive tasks, people want their work to be rewarded proportionally, so we recommend to reduce the effort needed and hide complexity by simplifying the workflow with probing questions and branching logic
People want to know their information will be used - and how, thus we recommend being more transparent with the users, possibly by way of an instructional video.
We also uncovered a number of heuristic concerns with the tool, such as small text and confusing navigation, that lead us to recommending InheRET continue to work with other courses at UMSI to continue to improve.