C.A.R.T
online course
UBC CPD CASE STUDY
eLEARNING
ROLES.
prototyping, hi-fi mockups
user research and analysis
wireframing, interaction design
DURATION. GROUP.
4 months
UBC CPD Creative Team
DELIVERABLES.
Create an eLearning course for family physicians depicting the updated information on abortion care within Canada.
C.A.R.T eLearning Course
Access to abortion is a human rights issue. It is crucial to provide compassionate care to everyone seeking abortion, yet many, particularly in rural communities, face significant barriers to receiving safe, stigma-free care.
overview
Background.
As a part of UBC CPD's initiative of creating innovative educational resources for healthcare professionals, I had the privilege of being part of one of the ten teams within the Contraception & Abortion Research Team (CART), funded by Health Canada. CART now has over 900 registered healthcare professionals, with nearly 400 certified.
Objective.
This project seeks to develop tailored education on abortion care using an eLearning accredited course, focusing on addressing the intersectional barriers faced by underserved populations.
Designing for Education.
Diversity. Empathy.
Accessibility. Carity.
Visuals are a powerful design tool, conveying complex ideas and emotions more effectively than words alone. This is particularly crucial in this course, which addresses emotionally charged topics like abortion, combines heavy medical information, and challenges existing ideologies and stereotypes.
Designing Interactions.
The course featured an interactive case study with five individuals from diverse backgrounds, highlighting their struggles with abortion access. The dense information, derived from a 4-page Google document, required crucial segmentation for easier learning consumption and to avoid cognitive overload. I brainstormed different interactions for specific content types based on the concerns each addressed.
Ultimately a microsite case study with 5 different personas was decided upon to walk them through each step of their journey, accompanied by illustrations to demonstrate their struggles and successes.
Considerations
Timeline
Challenge of visually showing how long each patients path takes & overall time the process took to get successful/unsuccessful abortion care.
Visual Complexity
The case study featured 57 visual representations of each step and interactive element. Given the time constraints, what might the fidelity of these visuals be?
Content Architecture
How might we break down educational content into consumable pieces of information within a microsite user flow?
Visual Development.
The case study microsite used flip-card interactions to break down content into digestible pieces, allowing me to create illustrations for each step that visualized the persona's race, cultural challenges, emotions, and setting, providing better context for care providers.
Tackling Visual Complexity.
We misjudged illustration fidelity. As a result, two weeks of illustrations had to be scrapped, leading to the decision to adopt a medium icon fidelity style instead due to the following factors:
Illustration Scale
Tight Timeline
Visual Cohesion
The illustrations were developed alongside the microsite, but once imported, their ratios were too small, resulting in lost details.
The project timeline was too compressed to achieve the initial level of fidelity expected by our team.
Maintaining visual cohesiveness was challenging due to tight time constraints.
To resolve the issue while maintaining quality and representing the issues of hand, I worked on transferring the initial illustration to a medium icon fidelity style.
Timeline Iteration.
The most important takeaway of the case study, was the difference in time between the proper care of abortion process and the lack of education version. How to show this amount of time was difficult, as it was notjust length, but the intensity of the struggle at each point in the process.
We thought of ways to visually represent "knots," clear paths, calendar dates, and the timeline length for the interaction to demonstrate this.
Take-aways.
This project began my interest in healthcare experience design, seeing how my design choices can directly impact the community. While I successfully used visuals to simplify complex concepts, I see room to improve my illustrations. In future projects, I would experiment with adding animations or gifs to better convey stories and clarify content, enhancing user engagement and making the experience more intuitive, something I would prioritize if given more time.