Campus Flu Kiosk

University of Washington

Fall 2019

Giving students, faculty, and staff at the University of Washington the ability to report their flu-like symptoms in order for the community to better understand and prepare for the coming flu season through the use of self-reported data.

Problem

The flu kiosk is designed specifically for people to report and track the flu in their community. Many people are aware of the ongoing flu season, but do not participate in reporting their symptoms. The existing flu systems currently on the market are not widely used and don't show the spread of symptoms in a particular area, showing a gap in the current tracking technology. These market gaps guided us into creating a solution that's both convenient and easy to use and that would fit seamlessly into the users’ everyday life.

Research

Our team Chose a survey, interviews, and contextual inquiry for our research methods.

The brief survey gave us a clear understanding that most people do not currently use any sort of system to report their flu-like symptoms. As our target users were people at the University of Washington, we were able to simply send it out to anyone we had access to on campus.

We conducted 5 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at the University of Washington. From these we discovered people would be willing and interested in reporting their symptoms, if it did not require much effort on their part and would fit easily into their everyday life.

Our contextual inquiry turned out to be a wrong user research approach for this project, as none of our users previously used any sort of flu-tracking system. It did however give us an insight on users actions when they are feeling sick which helped with our design requirements.

The user research methods we chose led us to our design requirements for this project:

Seamlessly fit into user’s life - meaning users could use our design without much hassle or having to severely change their daily routines.

Ethical Data Usage - meaning that data input from user’s would remain anonymous if so desired and the data would be safely and ethically stored.

Applicable Time-Scope - meaning kiosks would only function during flu-season, so as to make the data accurate and the averages/trends appropriate.

Real-Time Data - meaning the data could be immediately visualized by the users on a map that they could find helpful.

Health and Hygiene Mindfulness - meaning our kiosk would attempt to mitigate the spread of germs from users through the a very specific interaction.

Sense of Contribution - meaning users would be motivated to input their data by feeling a sense of contribution to something that can help us all.

Ideation & Sketching

Finding a Possible solution

Once we had our design requirements, we started sketching out possible ideas. We knew it needed to be something that would be simple to use and would fit easily into the user’s life. We each made 8 initial sketches with different ideas. From those 32 sketches, we asked our classmates to pick which one they liked the best. This led us to a key chain, a canvas platform pop-up, and the physical kiosk.

Considering this was our first project for HCDE, we wanted to do something a little more out of the ordinary, so as a team, we decided to do a physical kiosk for our design solution. We each did another set of sketches of just the kiosk. Once completed, we critiqued the sketched and discussed the strengths, weaknesses, feasibility, and originality of each one. From there we landed on a final sketch to prototype.

Prototyping & Testing

As it was unrealistic for us to prototype the physical kiosk with high fidelity, we decided to focus on the interface and keep the rest relatively simple. Using Figma to prototype our interface, we were able to quickly and neatly create the self-reporting interface of the kiosk.

Using a styrofoam cooler, some hot glue, and scissors, we made the physical stand with a space to fit my iPad. The kiosk did not have a functioning vending mechanism for our “free, preventative flu kit”, which users would receive upon completion of the report, so we used the Wizard of Oz technique to show the function during testing.

For our user testing, we gave users a list of tasks to perform with the prototype. We also asked them general questions about their interaction with the kiosk and their main pain points.

Findings

The following issues were things our team was already aware of but our testing confirmed needed to be fixed:

• Lack of feedback when selecting buttons

• Lack of back button

• Confusions regarding the map

There were other issues however, that our team did not expect and found extremely surprising, such as:

• Words and phrases in the interface were unclear

• Directions regarding the temperature scanner were confusing

• Users were afraid to physically touch a screen that potentially sick people had interacted with

Iteration & Final Design

Our findings from user testing helped us understand issues we needed to fix for our iteration and final design.

Iteration

• Integrating a gesture system instead of a touchscreen to avoid the spread of germs

• Changing the kiosk to be triangular with two screens for increased usage and detectability

Design Decisions

As a team, we made three major design decisions for this project in order to better address the problem at hand:

1. We decided to design for a physical kiosk in order to make our design stand out and increase the likelihood of user interaction as they encounter it during their normal day. A physical kiosk also allows for improved data privacy since input can be anonymous.

2. We decided to make the kiosk triangular. This would not only increase usage because of the two screens, but it would allow users to spot the kiosk from more angles rather than just head on, thus increasing the usage and the ability to collect more helpful data.

3. We decided to switch from a touch interface to a gesture interface. This way users would not have to actually touch the screen in order to interact with it but instead, they simply hover their hand in front of the screen to make their selections. Using this type of interface minimizes the spread of germs by a system that is meant to help control the flu better.

Constraints

Limited time

Due to this being a 10-week project, we had to move quickly. We were not able to go into as much detail as we would have liked.

Limited resources

As this was a smaller project, we were limited in resources such as money, materials, technical expertise, etc.

Lack of business considerations

We were very focused on the design of this project and did not discuss business considerations, such as the actual cost of such a design. That is obviously something that would need to be considered in the real world.

Reflection

Thinking back

This was my very first UX project and I have learned a lot from it. It gave me my first real insights of how the UX process works and validated my passion for this field and my decision to join the HCDE master’s program. This project forced to me acknowledge that I am still new to this field, but that I should not be afraid to ask for help when I need it, as we are all still learning. It also taught me a lot about efficient planning and making sure that the team works well together in order to complete the project and satisfy the constraints.

Thinking forward

If we would have had more resources and time available, I think we would have liked to talk more extensively with the medical services on campus to really understand what type of information would be most helpful to them. We would have also taken more time to iterate the interface, as there were some bugs we simply did not have the time to fix and created workarounds for instead.