My team worked with Johnson & Johnson, our sponsor, to tackle the issue of chronic pain in the US with product & service design in 15 weeks.
Achievement
1st Place in Strategic Innovation in Product & Service Design Case (Fall 2021)
We moved back and forth among the four phases, as the design process is not linear. There were times when we needed to go back and redefine our challenge and when we shifted our research focus as we learned more about the topic.
The challenge prompt from our sponsor appeared to be broad, as there are a variety of chronic pains and corresponding care routines.
*Care routines refer to pain management activities such as physical exercise, yoga, healthy bedtime habits, versus surgical and medical treatments
We interviewed three industry experts to understand the market and explore opportunities from the company and product side.
People only start to take their chronic pain seriously when it gets unbearable. However, their motivation goes up and down due to their work and life schedule and condition. When their pain gets better, the motivation goes down, and they abandon the healthy routine.
We presented the storyboard to 4 people for their opinions. They expressed disapproval of having employees bet their own money to join challenges and were also concerned about the privacy issue. Therefore, we decided to have companies pay their employees tokens to join challenges, as employers would be willing to pay as long as the ROI is positive, and anonymize users in community forums.
Easily log in with SSO and fill in a brief questionnaire about your chronic pain condition to get started
Customized sets of challenges are recommended based on your condition, each lasting for 2-4 weeks
Receive tokens from your company every month and use them to join challenge groups
If you complete a challenge, you earn back the tokens you have bet and can redeem them for real money
Connect with your colleagues anonymously to ask for advice and share your own tips for managing pains
Our original plan was to let employees bet their own money to join the challenge. While testing with users using our storyboard, we received negative feedback on employees being required to pay to use a corporate wellness program. It was a valid point that we missed to consider, so we changed our solution to let companies provide tokens for their employees.
