VR for Healthcare Worker Self-Care

Getting Organized

Day 1: The Plan

With big ambitions and only two weeks to do them, I developed a preliminary timeline to guide my process and help me stay on track:

Doing this helped me identify what methods I wanted to use, why I was using them, and how I could implement them quickly and effectively.

Empathize

Day 2: Literature Review

Although I have a lot of personal experience as a healthcare worker, I did not want to rely solely on my own assumption and experiences. I explored academic papers to learn more about the problem space and check my hypothesis. I discovered there was a pretty big need for self-care.

Key Findings:

Health care workers report high levels of workplace stress, burnout and other 'work-related' mental illness.

Days 3 & 4: Interviews + Analysis

To better understand the people I would be designing for, I interviewed five healthcare workers about their current self-care practices and breaks at work. I focused on current behaviors and experiences, wants/needs, and the physical environment during breaks times.

In a field that's so high maintenance and so demanding, getting that time to just take a breath and step away from it all...that's what I want from my breaks.

I used thematic analysis and identified some common and interesting themes.

Define

Day 5: Check-In, Design Question, Persona Creation

I started with a quick reflection on the work I had done and what still needed to happen. Although I would have loved to continue my research and dive deeper into the problem space, I had uncovered enough valuable insights to move forward with the design process, and I needed to keep the project on schedule.

Using these research insights I created a design question to guide the rest of my process:

Persona

I used research findings to inform my primary user persona. Creating the persona allowed me to identify main user needs, better understand my users, and keep my users at the center of my design process.

Day 6: Design Requirements + Tradeoffs

The VR application must:

Creating an environment with user movement and object manipulation would be really time consuming. Instead, I decided to focus on the immersion of the environment and explore how components could create a relaxing experience in a short amount of time.

Defining these goals was important, because it helped me scope down my project and think about what I actually wanted to prototype for this first iteration of my enviroment.

Ideate

Day 7-8: Brainstorming, Sketching and Storyboarding

Using my research and design requirements as a guide, I brainstormed ideas for a VR environment and interactions. Sketching helped me work through my ideas quickly and make some decisions before creating the prototype.

I incorporated aspects of nature that had been mentioned during interviews as being relaxing, created a 360 sketch to see what the environment would look like in VR, and then added some potential places for interactions.

I sketched out various activities, scenes, components, and storyboards, and started to think about aspects of this experience that could be prototyped for a usability test. I explored existing and effective mindfulness and micro-restorative practices to use, optimizing for ones that fit with the design requirements.

I chose a simple breathing exercise, as several healthcare workers I interviewed mentioned using breathing for stress-relief. Additionally, I discovered that breathing at slower rates improves heart rate variability which has positive impacts on mood, health, and stress adaptation.

Adding Audio

While working on my sketches I discovered the power of audio in VR to reduce stress and increase immersion. I did some quick digging and found that certain nature sounds have positive impacts on stress reduction. Healthcare workers I interviewed had also mentioned listening to music during their breaks as a way to relax.

I was curious if adding audio would make immersion easier in noisy break settings, so I decided to pivot to include audio into my prototype and see what feedback I got during usability.

Day 9-10: Paper + Audio Protoype

I used paper for the low-fidelity prototype because it was a quick and easy way to produce multiple components, test interactions, and create a sense of immersion within an environment. I used large pieces of paper to create nature scenes that would surround the user and orient them within a 3D space. I used a laser pointer to mimic VR raycasting input and allow the user to select and interact with scene components while remaining seated.

Adding interactive and customizable audio components was a little tricker. I did some research into tools I had easy access to and found out that I could create a custom audio sampler using GarageBand and my keyboard.

I found some audio clips to match my scene and created keyboard labels for easier use.

Test

Day 11: Usability Test

The goals of the usability test were to evaluate interactions, features, and audio, and gather initial impressions of the environment. I used a task-based think-aloud protocol followed by a short interview, and captured data using video and audio recording, as the hands-on design of my prototype made it difficult to take notes.

During the test it was difficult to work the audio prototype, move the paper protoype, and pay attention to my participant. Although I was able to get good feedback, next time I would separate the UI interaction tasks and sounds effects in order to make it easier to conduct the overall test and be able to focus on observation and note-taking.

Main Insights

The usability test helped me understand I was on the right track with the design of the environment. My participant felt relaxed, enjoyed the customization, and was easily able to interact with the scene and complete the breathing exercise. The audio was a positive aspect of the experience and added to the sense of immersion.

3 Key Findings:

It helps with the guided meditation to physically be in a different space and be able to look around and focus on breathing. It feels relaxing.

Day 12-14: Digital Prototype

First Attempt

My original goal was to create an interactive digital prototype with Unity, incorporating the feedback I received during my usability test. After a long day of work I realized this was overly ambitious for the time I had. I decided to pivot to a different digital prototyping tool that would be much easier and faster to work with, but would require me to compromise on many of the interactions and customization my participant wanted.

Here is a full walk-through of my Unity environment:

Interactive Digital Prototype

Here is a full walk-through of my final digital prototype made in CoSpaces Edu:

Using CoSpaces allowed me to create a digital prototype but I was constrained by the features and options that were built into the software, and my digital prototype ended up being less dynamic than my paper one.

Reflection

Benefits and Tradeoffs

I learned there are benefits and tradeoff when deciding which type of medium to use for prototyping. Paper and audio allowed for immersion, a variety of interactions, and more customization of the design, but it also required me to be very hands-on and active during usability, and I ended up focus more on my prototype than my participant. The digital prototype required many design compromises, but usability testing it would have been much easier for me and might have provided similar feedback.

In the future I would likely use a combination of paper and digital prototyping for user testing of my environment. I would first use paper for prototyping and testing 2D UI interaction, menu features, and other individual components, and then use an immersive digital prototype to test the full scene.

If I had more time, I would conduct a usability test using my digital prototype to see how it compared to the paper prototype.

Next Steps

Long-term I would use an agile design process to continue development the environment while simultaneously collecting and incorporating user feedback. The goal would be to create a version that could be deployed on a standalone headset (such as Oculus Quest) and conduct feasibility, desireability, and usability testing in healthcare break settings.

I would expand my participant groups to gather feedback from a larger and more diverse group of healthcare workers, accounting for different ages, professions, work settings, and current technology use and proficiency.

Main Takeaways