Leveraging User Experience Design Expertise in Palliative Care Intervention Science

Palliative care interventions for children with serious illness require real-world design expertise to bring research to the bedside in ways that are engaging, effective, and feasible.

To describe the collaborative process of bringing an evidence-based humanistic care intervention, photo-narratives, through practical user experience (UX) design for future implementation at a children's hospital.

The collaborative design process was completed at an academic university. Researchers at the affiliated children's hospital approached two teams of UX design graduate students to (1) further refine and (2) develop a technology-integrated implementation strategy for the photo-narrative intervention.

The researchers and teams met weekly to follow a project-specific seven-step UX design approach, including (1) framing project timeline and deliverables, (2) regulatory and access considerations, (3) understanding the problem and intervention, (4) data collection, (5) design constraints (information technology considerations, workflow), (6) low-fidelity prototyping, and (7) usability testing and high-fidelity prototyping.

Collaboration between researchers and UX design teams can further the critical intervention design and prototyping that is essential to implementing successful real-world palliative care interventions.