Illuminating Design in Healthcare
Written by Liv Jenks and Kelly Niethammer
This fall, SWID’s Design Partnerships team launched an interview series to connect our community with influential designers. We cast a wide net, talking to industry leaders in health, wellness, education, tech, and social entrepreneurship to bring you answers to big design questions, including: What is “good” design, and how is that definition evolving? How can intersectional perspectives be incorporated into the design thinking process? How do we design for social good? How does design thinking differ at start-ups versus larger firms?
For this installment, we talked to Margaux Giles, a lead designer at Madefor, Sonia Garcia, the Director of Member Experience at Brightline Health, Sarah Payne, the Director of Product at Parsley Health, and Kayla Guillory, a former user experience specialist at Change Healthcare. Below, you will discover their varied and vibrant journeys into design, insights into their current roles, and where they see design headed.
1. First, let’s learn a bit more about these amazing women.
Margaux Giles: During her freshman year at Stanford, Margaux’s previous design experience allowed her to take upper level d.school classes. She began doing the product design (PD) major core in her sophomore and junior year, but found it repetitive with past classes. “That’s when I started noticing that it was just one way of knowing, one way of researching being taught, and that fueled my desire to major in Science, Technology, and Society with an Innovation and Organization concentration. With STS, I was able to skip some of the PD core classes that I thought were not as relevant to the kind of design I wanted to do. Instead, I was able to take some anthropology and philosophy classes, which I think are super important to understanding design thinking history and enriched my perspective by exposing me to other ways of thinking and problem solving. Designers often come into spaces thinking that they’re experts or that they can become experts after a certain number of interviews, and in my creative role at Madefor, I’m trying to undo that by bringing everyone into these deep dives to minimize the gatekeeping that often happens with design thinking.”
Sonia Garcia: Sonia attended a science-focused high school, where she was able to delve deeply into engineering and design courses. In one of her classes, her teacher showed the world famous IDEO shopping cart video, which fascinated Sonia and planted the seed in her head of what it means to redesign an everyday object. After college, Sonia was drawn to biomedical engineering, but “knew that I was drawn to to really dive deeper into the mental and behavioral health space based on what I’d learned from my brother’s mental health struggles.” After graduating from the Design Impact Program at Stanford, “I thought either I am going to found my own startup or I am going to partner with those who are doing it and who are doing it — from what I’ve found and learned — the right way, and that’s how I found Brightline.”
Sarah Payne: After graduating from USC with a degree in business, Sarah dove into investment banking, which she says gave her a foundation of skills that she knew would serve her in whatever decided to do down the line. She then moved to Survey Monkey, where she started on the business side and later pivoted to product management. “In my experience as a Product Manager, you’re not necessarily managing people directly, but you are responsible for managing a team of engineers and designers. I am really setting the direction for what they work on. The product manager and their team are assigned a specific metric to work on, or some new initiative, so I kind of think of myself as the aircraft carrier, steering it in this certain direction.” For example, Sarah was responsible for growing Parsley’s telehealth business — before COVID even hit — and worked to figure out how to get people to try telehealth.
Kayla Guillory: Kayla came to Stanford expecting to major in Mechanical Engineering, but quickly fell in love with Product Design’s interdisciplinary lens. “I loved Product Design because it was a really cool way to explore a bunch of different things but also tie them together. I wanted to take art and psychology classes, and it was a great way to still take technical classes and end up with an engineering degree.” After graduating, she went to work at Change Healthcare, which creates software for providers to address healthcare’s biggest challenges. As a User Experience Specialist at Change, she did both research and design, placing her between UX researchers and designers. “I would go out in the field, and lead a lot of user interviews — which was very fun and rewarding. Something cool about healthcare, and also really terrifying, is there are so many different stakeholders. I would interview patients, physicians, office staff, and it was super, super interesting to understand how all the pieces of healthcare come together so that we could design products for everybody.” Guillory is now applying to graduate schools with design innovation programs.
2. Incorporating diverse perspectives into the design process is crucial because there are so many stakeholders in healthcare.
Giles: “The design thinking framework, as it’s taught at Stanford, can be really narrow and constricting and not allow for that diversity of perspective and collaboration across fields. I’ve learned at Madefor that it’s important to know when to bring in other perspectives that are not users, even when they might not seem immediately relevant to the design framework because they can help solve problems down the road. For example, we could adapt our design framework to include perspectives like nutrition experts or talking to a team member that works with data to help explain patterns in user interviews.”
Payne: “Design thinking in the health and wellness space has been one of the most fun parts of my job because I’m able to bring in people from marketing, engineering, product, design, clinical backgrounds, and health coaches. In healthcare, you are working with providers, who are talking to customers all day, so they have a really good understanding of what patients want and that is a really great component to add to a design sprint. They can really speak on behalf of the patient you are designing solutions for. ”
3. There are many legal regulations to navigate when designing in healthcare.
Payne: “Healthcare inherently has a lot of rules, regulations, and laws. When I worked at a tech company, there was a mentality of ‘We can do anything’, ‘You want to design this thing — ok, let’s just do it!’ There are not so many ramifications in tech as there are in healthcare, which we will hopefully see change in the future.” For example, Parsley Health explored giving people health recommendations in cases when they don’t necessarily need to meet with a doctor face to face, but every state has different legal regulations around telehealth, prohibiting them from scaling the idea. “I think of Facebook’s long-time motto to move fast and break things, and then you think of the hippocratic oath that doctors take of ‘Do no harm’, and it’s a completely opposite mindset. In healthcare, there is that practical, humane side that you have to address after you think of your ideal,” said Sarah.
Garcia: Given their telehealth model, Brightline wants to grow to provide their services across the nation. “But, we have to be cognizant that if our practitioners’ licensing doesn’t apply in different states, then we can’t deliver care there. With teletherapy, we need to be within state lines. I think design has always had constraints, it’s just very, very clear constraints when you are in the healthcare field.”
4. Accessibility and inclusivity are central to design thinking in healthcare.
Guillory: “Accessibility is a big one because, in designing for healthcare, you really have to design for everyone. More than a lot of other spaces, the idea of a target user is just a lot more difficult because you want everybody to be healthy and have great technology when it comes to healthcare. And though accessibility is a big piece, it is still evolving in terms of what frameworks to use, what is standard, and ensuring those adhere to legal guidelines.”
Giles: “At Madefor, as much as we want everything to reflect our scientific groundwork, it has to be a human product at the end of the day. A large part of our member base are people who want to put their trust in us. They know we’ve checked the science box, and they don’t have to worry about it. Given that, I really try to prioritize the human touch in the design, making sure our users see the humans behind the product and that they feel reflected in the community. I’m talking about design more abstractly, but we’re really intent on humanizing the brand to make it feel warm and welcoming.”
5. Hot takes: Where is design headed?
Guillory: Human-centered design is key to inclusive design.
“I definitely think that the emphasis on human-centered design is continuing to grow and, though it’s already pretty big, I was in the Silicon Valley bubble for so long that sometimes I think I took it for granted. During my sophomore year, I did an internship on the East Coast, and I was so surprised at how different it felt from that Silicon Valley human-centered design, research-focused mentality. There’s a long way to go for a lot of companies that are just realizing how valuable human-centered design can be.”
Giles: Design is due for a reckoning.
“It’s tough to say as one person, one perspective. But I think it’s interesting to look at fashion as an adjacent field, which has taken a few big hits lately with sustainability and a lot of the racism that’s inherent in fashion structures has been revealed. A lot of fashion houses and magazines have been called to reckon with that and imagine better futures moving forward. In a similar way, as a designer, you should be called to think of the impact of your work. I don’t think design always has to be political, but when you’re an active, professional designer creating products for people, you have an absolute responsibility to address the social structures that your product lives in and impacts.”
Garcia: We will adapt to address product duplicity.
As product design continues to grow, Sonia thinks that the next phase for the industry is handling duplicity. “Now that we are seeing that it’s so easy to make, so many versions of things are being designed and saturated across so many user bases. Consumers and users will always have a choice, but there needs to be a higher level of intention and education into helping users feel good about their choices.”
Payne: Recognize design as a strategic (not just visual) framework.
“If you think back to even 10 or 15 years ago, design was seen more as a visual thing. I think the design-thinking concept marked a very important shift, which made design have more of a strategic function, creating space for designers to facilitate strategic workshops or decision making across the company, and they are also there to do the visual manifestation. It is an amazing skill set to be able to do both of those.”
6. Tips, tricks, and helpful hints.
Interdisciplinary interests are a strength: “People love interdisciplinary designers and having a background in something else is not a weakness. There is no wrong path. Design is one of those really cool fields where you can take what you learned from almost any field and apply it, or use it to think about a new field in a totally different way,” said Guillory.
Should I go to grad school right out of college? “Having experience is incredibly helpful. I thought a lot about going straight to grad school right after I graduated, and got close to doing it, but I think having experience in the industry gives you so much more to grab onto. It’s helped me figure out what programs to apply to that will give me more of what I love about my job. If people have a graduate program that they know they want to go straight into, that’s great. But if you’re on the fence, it’s becoming more and more acceptable to take that break, get the experience, and then to go back,” said Guillory.
Develop your hard skills. “Design is a skill-based profession, and it’s amazing if your career goal is to focus on strategy and thinking, but to get your foot in the door, you need to have certain skills to offer. I recommend reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. It’s about how building your craft is so much more important than passion-based pursuits and that definitely resonated with me early on, because not having some of those skills was definitely a pain point I felt early on. And what’s great is there’s so much you can do outside of school to learn those tools — online material, courses, and self-directed practice,” said Giles. Payne echoed this: “Staring with the skills is the most important thing you can do. You are going to get a ton of credibility if you can do things well, and learning a lot of the fundamentals is helpful when you become responsible for bigger areas.”
Get your (design) reps in. “I would really recommend that you start to practice design because it’s so important and easier than ever. The amount of virtual and online tutorials available are phenomenal. There’s a great Chrome plug-in called Muz.li that delivers really cool design inspiration, and I also suggest subscribing to daily design challenges. Get over the fear, get over the ‘I have to be perfect’ tendency, and just start challenging yourself as much as you can,” Garcia recommends.
Think about what you want to get out of each work experience. “When you are taking a job, be really intentional about what you are going to get out of it, and it doesn’t have to be everything. When I was leaving college, I think I was looking for a perfect role, and I’ve learned that’s not how the world works. I’ve learned that people work at companies at different points in their lives for different reasons — it may be monetary, work-life balance, skills building — so identify your reason and what you can learn from a role,” said Payne.
