User Research
We conducted 6 user interviews with surgical mentees, mentors, and program directors to gain a deeper understanding of how surgeons best learn, incorporate, and provide feedback. We also wanted to learn about the pain points mentees and mentors experience with the current mentorship structure.
This is what they said:
“The laparoscopic simulator or the robotic simulator, they’re locked away in a room on campus you never go to unless you spend your whole day looking for it to get a little bit of practice in.”
Accessibility is an important factor in practicing.
“It’s huge to be able to have some wins while also giving the trainee some pointers for how they can continue to improve.”
Being able to provide constructive feedback would be helpful for learners.
“Resource overload is certainly a thing and that could be the case in terms of overly complicating things but leveraging the things that we have is very important particularly for people who may not always have the access that I’m fortunate to have in terms of mentorship and people around me.”
That’s a fine balance in making sure something is not being overly complicated.
User Persona
- Year 3 medical student
- Looking to improve their surgical skills to prepare for when they scrub in on surgeries
- Difficult time balancing the medical school curriculum, clinical rotations, and personal life
- Lack of personalized feedback on surgical skills
- Lack of opportunities to practice on a simulated surgical field
- Year 6 surgical resident
- Lack of opportunity to give individualized feedback to medical students on specific surgical skills
- Difficult time balancing surgeries, consultations, and teaching
Mentor Capabilities
Because this dashboard needs to be easily accessed anywhere in the world, including areas with inconsistent internet connection, it would need to contain the minimum features necessary for mentors to provide feedback. Using the data I collected from user interviews with potential mentors and conversations with the GlobalSurgBox director, I finalized the mentor capabilities.
Exploring Screen Components
While designing the general mentor dashboard, I wanted to create a page where the mentors could view and access all of their students’ submissions easily. Although single column user interfaces allow for a more straightforward experience by allowing mentors to focus on one video at a time, I ultimately decided to move forward with a double column layout. As mentors are extremely busy individuals, it was critical to ensure that they could navigate through the videos quickly and easily.
Exploring a Different Way of Learning
The most challenging part of this project was designing the system that would be used to provide feedback to the mentees. To do so, I had to understand how mentees learn, receive, and incorporate feedback best. During my user interviews, I had asked both mentors and mentees to walk me through the last time they received feedback on a surgical technique. For the grading system to cater to both mentors and mentees, I had asked them what forms of feedback they respond to best or what forms of feedback they primarily provide.
From my user interviews, I had concluded that constructive feedback would be essential for the learner’s growth. When designing the system that mentors would use to provide this feedback, it was critical that mentors would be able to provide an objective mark while also being able to provide open-ended comments that directly addressed each mentee. My first iteration of the grading system involved one pass fail score for the mentee’s overall performance and the ability to provide open-ended feedback. By collaborating with GlobalSurgBox, I realized that this system was too broad and limiting. By creating pass fail scores for every technique involved in the surgical skill, this system would be able to address more specific areas of the mentee's performance, allowing for a detailed evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses.
Both mentees and mentors contextualized the fact that growth is dependent and variable for each learner but emphasized how important real-time, verbal feedback is because written feedback is often hard to provide in the operating room, delayed, and removed from the moment. To mirror the mentorship that students would receive in-person, I decided to create a feature that allows mentors the ability to leave in-video comments that targeted the specific moments during the surgical practice videos where feedback is most relevant. In turn, this system allows mentees to pinpoint exact instances in the video where a technique needs improvement or where they demonstrated a particular strength.
What's Next?
As the semester is wrapping up, my fellow designers and I plan to conduct user testing with potential mentees and mentors. Based on the usability tests, we’ll incorporate the feedback and insights we gain on our final iteration and then hand off our designs to the developers on our lovely team.
I had the best time learning from and collaborating with all of the inspiring individuals involved in GlobalSurgBox. This project truly highlighted the importance of user research. Through the conversations I had with medical students and residents, I gained so much insight on how medical education operates in the United States. Initially, I had assumed there was a clear boundary between individuals categorized as mentees and individuals categorized as mentors but as I spoke to medical students, interns, and residents of different post-graduation years, I realized that more often than not, an individual is both a mentee and a mentor! Because the medical field is always evolving (much like design!), it is important that healthcare professionals are continuously learning and growing - and as such, it was important to recognize that our designs provided tools for both learning and teaching.
As someone who previously studied Public Health, this was an opportunity unlike any other to explore the intersection of two fields I’m extremely passionate about! I am super grateful to have been able to work on this project with not only my fellow designers (Joe and Cynthia) but the entire software team at Engineering World Health.
