“Observation becomes empathy when we use our design research to confront our own biases and assumptions about who we are, not just our biases and assumptions about who our users are.”
-Dieter Rams
Great, inspiring design brings our propositions – that is the value and experience we provide to our customers and users – to life. It makes them engaging, compelling and ultimately desirable.
Positive sleep or respiratory patient outcomes often require treatments that are not necessarily “passive” in nature. By nature, they require an active engagement. For example, some therapies require that people wear a device – at home, at work, while travelling. And some conditions must be managed and treated over long periods of time, over the course of an individual’s life. Great design can make those points of engagement – those everyday interactions that contribute to improving health – easier to navigate, easier to manage. Easier to understand in terms of what the treatment is doing physiologically to the patient, what impact is it having. Helping answer: is anything changing or improving?
Think of the patient as what they are first and foremost, a person. View the challenge through the lens of this person, and their journey. First, one becomes aware of having a problem. There is the experience of trying to understand what that problem is and what it means, and there can be a lot of anxiety involved. Then there is often some point in time where one decides, “well ok I have this problem, now what do I do?” Of course, things are not always so linear.
By engaging with actual people and involving them in the development process, we can understand what that whole journey currently looks like. This helps us answer: how do we make a new journey that is better, easier to travel through. We seek to identify the opportunities along that journey where we – meaning Philips – can help make improvements. We see that maybe we need to create multiple, new propositions at various points along that journey to enhance the experience start to finish.
We also need to look well beyond the therapy device. To a supporting app that monitors performance in order to keep people engaged and compliant over time. Maybe we see that we need to create a portable travel device – because part of the patient journey includes vacation or frequent business trips.
“So I have my sleep therapy device at home, but I am a business person and don’t want to haul this big thing around.”
“Am I getting better?”
“Am I staying the same?”
Philips uses the co-create process. Essentially, this is our branded approach and mindset to promote collaboration across functions, departments, and (very important) end users.
Why do we follow this approach? For one: to make sure our personal biases are not clouding the creative process. We want to bring our expertise – our design expertise, marketing, technical – but not our preconceived notions about what we think is right for the end user – whether a physician, DME, or patient. And two, and this is: it encourages radical empathy for our customers, so this drives design. Involving them, spending time with them to gather insights and feedback, helps create designs that resonate with them, are meaningful for them. In short, it helps us to create more effective, impactful solutions. Plus you may learn that the proposition you set out with is not really what is needed. You learn the difference from what you think they want, vs. what is really needed to achieve whatever the end objective is.
Sleep and respiratory propositions have always fallen in the sweet spot between serious medical and consumer. People need clinical solutions to help improve their lives. Most of our sleep and respiratory propositions are used at home or in public, the context makes them as much “consumer” while also conveying confidence and trust in these serious health propositions. We've always had that approach and mindset.
In this digital age, consumer expectations are though the roof. Now I as a consumer can buy something on my phone or by simply talking to a piece of hardware or click in an app and have it delivered to my door the next day. That is my expectation. Even though we may have a serious highly sophisticated medical grade app, it still has deliver the same kind of interactions that I have come to expect if I were using a consumer solution. And we have to think bigger about the entire experience of treatment and maintaining health, beyond just a single interaction.
