UX Research: HIV Online Social Support Platform
Healthcare，research- driven
Role
UX Researcher & Designer
Duration
Aug 2016 -July 2017
Team
Research lead: Dr. Joshua Introne; Developer: Irem Gokce Yildirim
Methods
Interview, Focus group, Quantitative analysis, Wireframing, Prototyping
Contribution
“Positive People” on the App Store or google play,
that’s what ultimately became of my research.
Barriers between People Who Live with HIV(PLWH) & Social support Stigma associated with the disease, keeping PLWH away from social support.
Context
WebMD’s design change— hard for people to find and continue their conversations, ultimately lead the community to shrink.
Problem
By designing an online platform to allow PLWH to learn, share and help each other. The focus of this design is to make the online community trusted and active.
Design goal
Understanding users
Target users
people who are HIV positive
Two-week research has been conducted to get to know more about HIV/AIDS and PLWH. Main focus includes Social support, PLWH, Issues of obtaining social support, Advantages and issues for online social support platform.
Secondary research
One interview has been conducted with an HIV facilitator in East Lansing, MI. Online social support has been found necessary and the stigma issue among PLWH has been strengthened.
Interview
Two focus groups have been conducted to talk directly with PLWH in Lansing, MI. 7 people(3 female, 4male) were in the first group and 5(1 female, 4 male) were in the second one. Each focus group lasted for 90 minutes.
Focus group
Looking at the industry
A competitive analysis has been conducted which comparing 15 chronic illness forums.
Some low-activeness forums destroyed the social community’s sustainability. And some outstandingly good things have been noticed. Correlations between activeness and each forum components have been calculated.
Competitive analysis
Research insights
Social support is very important for PLWH.
Being exposed is one of PLWH’s biggest fears, which also becomes the biggest barrier for them to get access to social support.
They are afraid of telling others also because they don’t know HIV/AIDS well.
Both facilitator and PLWH agree that online HIV social support could be a great solution to reduce the fear of being exposed.
Trust is very important and needs to be considered carefully during the HIV online community design process.
Invite-only platform
Interactive instructions for newcomers
Easy-scan forum layout
Easy instruction and process for experience sharing & narrative matching
Quick “Catch up” section for returning members
“Recommended” section to encourage members to interact with new contents and people rather than only with those they already know
6 core features:
Design
Sketch
Prototype
A combination of a usability evaluation and the think aloud method has been used in this user test. Background interview, user observation and post interview have been used for better understanding of the user.
Feedback:
More instructions are needed for new users.
The user could not predict “new users” will be in recommended section.
User testing
Iterations
flow 1
User testing shows the interactive prototype works quite well for our goal. More interactive instructions have been added for newcomers to quickly get the forum’s functions.
flow 2
Future work
Smart pill management function
Health tracker with sharing function
Website development and summative evaluation
More detailed flow design to implement invite mechanism
Text based design and development based on user needs, in order to reach out more target users who have problem of accessing the online website