Case Study

Client:

TOUCH (Together Our Unity Can Heal) in Rockland County New York is a community-based public health organization that provides compassionate and effective services to their neighbors in the Hudson Valley. TOUCH has been a Ryan White AIDS Service Organization for over 30 years. Their work leads to healthier individuals and stronger communities.

Organization:

TouchNY.org

Project Title:

Ideas, Prototypes and Recommendations for Digital Form Systems

Course:

SUNY WCC ITECH 240 New Media Projects

Designer:

Dana F.

Description:

For the New Media Projects course, a course about using product design to solve problems, I decided to try to tackle the challenge of converting paper-based forms and records to digital. This task turned out to be more difficult than I was expecting. I learned a lot about the challenges organizations face when attempting to transition to digital records. My final project is a slideshow that details how I applied the design thinking process.

Challenges:

When I started off, I had to complete my weekly assignments without much information from the client. To solve this, I initiated interviews with the client on my own.

Often, whenever I got to interview the client, I would learn that what I had been working on wouldn't work and that I needed to start over; but I handled this well because I knew from reading the IDEO field guide that discarding ideas that don't work is a natural and important part of the design thinking process.

Strategy:

Whenever I was unsure about what to do, I would seek help from my professor and my family. Collaborating and talking with others is a crucial part of the design thinking process, because combining the knowledge of many different people with different perspectives is the best way to arrive at the solution.

Design Approach:

Whenever I thought about how an idea would be implemented, I tried to think of what flaws the idea might have and how those flaws could be fixed or alleviated.

I always checked to see if an idea I had already existed, and if the existing product met my expectations. There's no point putting a huge effort into prototyping an idea if an adequate implementation of it already exists.

Results:

Over the course, I created Figma prototypes of a simplified modification of the open source PDF reader PDF.js and a program that automatically converts a PDF to a digital form.

Here is my finished final project: a slideshow in which each slide shows one phase of the design thinking process, from "Empathize" to "Prototype".