UXA2022 Day 1; Paul Merrel and Lauren Argenta - From matter to meta

How to establish multi-disciplinary teams to effectively design and build products

Meld and Thinkmill have been closely working together in a cross-consultancy model, to bring together a multidisciplinary team for solving hard real-world digital challenges. Together we have established an approach to understand and identify what and how to design and build before undertaking the time and investment into making it. We will be sharing our experience, learnings and top tips from working with a cutting edge government agency.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2022 – Hybrid Conference Thursday, 25 August 2022 Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Carmel Downes
2. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 63 on our video because the host has stopped it. We are sick but we are still nice. STEVE BATY: We are waiting for the cheque to clear. (LAUGHTER) just be a moment. Is that better? Here we are. Thank you. LAUREN ARGENTA: Thank you, so much. We are so sorry we can't be there with all of you lovely people but hopefully we can be there and share energy this way. Myself, Lauren and Paul, will be talking through - we were meant to be joined by a third person, Darian, our partner and colleague throughout all of this but he hasn't been able to join us through personal reasons. He will be here with the power of technology and hopefully that will make sense. Let's get started. From Meta to matter, forming multidisciplinary teams. Designing a building is hard, I am sure you know that. Designing a building in one well connected team, who all know each other, is super hard. Designing a building with many teams when we are talking about multidisciplinary practices is incredibly hard but it can be done and it can be done well. When all parts are amplified, outcomes can really deliver. PAUL MERRELL: I am Paul, we are a service design organisation improving the lives of people as they interact with the world around them. The way we do that is use the philosophy and tool set of design as a way of approaching the ambiguity and complexity of challenges, just like this one. LAUREN ARGENTA: I am Lauren, a design director from Thinkmill. We are an Australian engineering consultancy company. We specialise in highly functional products, design systems and the intersection of design and
3. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 64 engineering. In 2021, Meld and Thinkmill came together to blend our individual strengths to create a full spectrum of service designs, strategy, research, new XUI design and build. It is enabling us to create a multidisciplinary collaboration for tackling complex problems as and when needed. This is bringing together service design and engineering-led design. PAUL MERRELL: That collaboration enables us to move from the matter to the matter and back again in one team, specialising in our respective areas but combining those skill sets and approaches to make the end-to- end process much more robust. LAUREN ARGENTA: Meta and Thinkmill joined forces with the Australian Digital Health Agency to undertake some of the identified challenges. Since January, we created a dedicated squad with blended practices from a search severed UX and UI design in engineering to be able to realise possible potential solutions for the future of My Health Record here in Australia. With the help of Darian, the director of experience and the service design from the Australian Digital Health Agency who you are about to hear from, we will tell you about how we created a diverse multidisciplinary team within that context to solve the challenges that we were presented with. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: Hello everyone, I am Darian Eckersley. Access and sharing of critical health information can improve health outcomes and the opportunity to deliver better access and management of this information from birth presents an amazing opportunity for this to follow and support citizens' health care through their life. My Health Record lets Australians control their health information securely in one place, any
4. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 65 time, meaning it is available when and where it is needed, either in an emergency, managing your health ongoing or during a health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together health information needed by you or your health care providers, medicines, allergies and test or scan results. Health care providers like doctors, specialists and hospital staff may also be able to see your information when they need to securely, including in an accident or emergency for improved safety, avoiding adverse events, duplication of services, improving patient outcomes and reduction of time gathering critical clinical information for more effective timely care. My Health Record strives for experience design to deliver on the following themes, a relevant and rich consumer health story, timely, accurate and digestible health information, deft care coordination and collaboration, trusted easy privacy control, inclusive fit for purpose access and availability, enhanced technical capability and interoperability and strong cross experiences. LAUREN ARGENTA: When I fell pregnant with my daughter, there was new complex health processes that I had never come across or knew that even existed. Those antenatal processes are complex and they ramp up quickly as you go through the process. As somebody who grew up outside of Australia, I didn't have prior exposure to health services within our health system that would have informed or guided me through this. For most, the first time it is going to be an unknown process and as the antenatal journey continues to pregnancy, it consists of many services and processes that all inter connect. PAUL MERRELL: Once the bub is born, there is a vast amount of health care management tasks that parents and carers have to undertake and there is an increasingly large amount of information that they will need to
5. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 66 remember for each and every child. That amount increases over time as they grow and grow and go through different vaccinations, different child health checks until the child is of an age that they can start to take ownership of their health data can which is about 14. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: We have this opportunity at this early discovery phase to invest in a design-led approach and delivering a guiding understanding of what the future of the My Health Record system could look like to inform the future product direction. Providing this information naturally is challenging, given differences across states and territories. The baby books, immunisations schedules, routine checks and schedules, services available, record systems, policies and challenges, we need to take all the variables and parents and carers needs into account to make access to desirable, feasible. LAUREN ARGENTA: The challenge we must set is how should pregnancy and childhood data be integrated and serviced into My Health Record in both a desirable and also feasible way to serve all Australians? PAUL MERRELL: When we think about desirability, we start off with what people need and what they aspire to in their health care experience. Then we look at how could those needs be better delivered to in a digital way by My Health Record and importantly, how can we ensure that that experience is inclusive for all users of My Health Record. LAUREN ARGENTA: We then went into the focus of feasibility. We started with the thought of what is the structure of the data? How is it configured or not? What metadata is attempted? Is it structured or unstructured and how can it be manipulated? We asked ourselves of the question of what is
6. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 67 the platform and how ostensible is it? By that we mean how easily can you join into it, onto it, around it or connect to it? Then you have to take into considerations of policy, of legislation and also of clinical safety. PAUL MERRELL: Desirability is about making design decisions for My Health record that are in the interests of people with lived experience and as health care providers rather than in support of data and technology. This doesn't mean that we are ignoring technology implications. The important part is keeping that tension between people as users of My Health Record and the technology of My Health Record. It means we are placing a priority on people and their experiences rather than prioritising engineering and uses this lens of desirability to prioritise those design decisions and resolve design challenges. LAUREN ARGENTA: We start with desirability first because if we started with feasibility first, then we may never build something that is most simple, loveable and complete because we may miss the opportunity. When we move to feasibility we have to consider the constraints. We have to consider the realities and those at times can provide us with other opportunities because they make us think harder, smarter and be creative within what we are presented with. The important part is really resting and learning from the different people that are involved, the different multidisciplinary practitioners to be able to leverage the tension between who has which practice, what should go from desirability through to feasibility. PAUL MERRELL: In the context of the project what does that actually mean? We want to share some of the things that we discovered. There is a lack of consolidation which means health information is in different
7. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 68 places at different times. Consumers get different experiences and receive different support, depending on where they go in that pregnancy journey. Privacy and trust around data sharing are key and then there's the burden of administration, so paper, significant administrative burden on people and also health care providers. What this means is we discover something that's highly desirable for people which is reducing that burden of administration, saving them time, saving them effort, saving them forgetting the paper records when they go along to an appointment but we have to balance that with that lack of consolidation and health care information in disparate places. While it is desirable to reduce that burden of administration, what becomes difficult, in terms of feasibility, is that complexity and consolidation, which limits that opportunity for that desirable outcome. The point is, a multidisciplinary team can take those two elements and maintain that tension between what's desirable, reducing that burden of administration and then at the same time balancing that with trying to resolve that complexity around consolidation. LAUREN ARGENTA: Where did that get us to? What we have here is a conceptual illustration of some of the ideas. I emphasise conceptual because this is about what the future might look like, but it is more about wrapping up the desirable and feasible ideas and concepts that were generated. What you can see in some of this walk through that we have here is that we are trying to look at ways in which the current constraint we can actually answer some of those desirable avenues that we discovered through the processes. For example, through pregnancy, it is a very structured process. Let's see if we could orient you to the position you are at. It is run by a week to week set of different points and things you need to do at different times. Secondly, being able to aggregate in unstructured data that would
8. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 69 otherwise sit on your phone or on a post it note so it is in one space could alleviate some of the burden of admin. Whilst aggregating all appointment systems that are across the various different services is nigh impossible, finding ways in which we would enable the complexities of organising our time, be in one place, may be a possibility. All this brings together and to life the proposal of the conceptual desirable and feasible future. What do we have here? This is us going through the takeaways, the learnings of when you are taking really hard to solve complex challenges we were faced with with a multidisciplinary team. This is a certain group of learnings that can hopefully help others undertaking similar processes, maximise their effectiveness as they go through. We will go through these and hopefully there will be takeaways you can use tomorrow or if you are putting together a team, you can take these into account as ways in which to orchestrate assemble. PAUL MERRELL: The first is be multidisciplinary from the beginning. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: Even the complexity of health records and considering customer needs, clinical governance, technical needs, policy legislations will ensure privacy and security is critical to work as a multidisciplinary team. This should be no different for desired agencies that we work with if we are to get the best design outcomes. PAUL MERRELL: We are talking about bringing together a multidisciplinary team such as Meld and Thinkmill, we are talking about a team within the Australian Digital Health Agency as well, so that is harnessing the power of their service designers and the talented designers that are part of that particular group but it is also bringing in clinical safety, it's bringing in policy, it's bringing in the business analysts
9. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 70 from the start of the project so you can share that language, talk with each other and work with each other as the design evolves. LAUREN ARGENTA: Number two, is fast and complete onboarding is mission critical. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: To get the best value out of our service partners and expertise, it made sense to share as much material as we could, introduce them to the right people across the agency, really treat them as we would onboarding a team member. Certainly wasn't about throwing a brief over the fence. LAUREN ARGENTA: Within days, the team onboarded us and we were given access to reliable and essential documentation. This transparency of access and the way it was spun up so quickly, enabled us to hit the ground running but it prevented time being lost during onboarding or additional admin tasks that would have to happen to get our balls rolling. Building on a shared and existing foundation of knowledge and work that had gone before us made sure we were equipped with everything we could be to undertake the challenge at hand. PAUL MERRELL: It is about creating a partnership with honest and open communication. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: The thing about this one, it wasn't anything we formally agreed but there was a relationship very much aligned to our internal team values while we were delivering the project. Honesty, respectful critique and transparency with how we worked together. These values and behaviours established to your team, I encourage you to make
10. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 71 sure you share them at the project kick-off when collaborating with an agency. PAUL MERRELL: They are nice words but what does it mean in action? It means us setting up those times, making ourselves available, people within the agency also making themselves available to have those regular show cases. The regular weekly catch-ups, the moments when we are reaching a critical point in the design to have those right conversations w that extended team, to be able to move the design forward but sharing, we are able to create that muscle memory together. LAUREN ARGENTA: Maintain a healthy tension between desirable and feasible. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: Our approach to start with what is desirable from a consumer point of view and learn through a vision of what My Health Record could do in the future. After that we needed the team to dial it back to what was realistic and work with the agencies teams to refine and prioritise what could be delivered in the nearer future. This was a valuable approach, it was efficient in informing current scope decisions. LAUREN ARGENTA: Being able to go wide before narrowing in was essential but also being given the space and the time to be able to do that was critical. That was one thing that the team at ADHA faltered so we could explore what the future could look like before getting into the details of what the day to day requirements would be. It ensured we could push the boundaries and also get to a practical end place that could help the team now taking the work on to propel forward.
11. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 72 PAUL MERRELL: This is not a business as usual approach, it is something you can use when you need that step change. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: We had in house experience the search design team who agreed to take on this kind of work. We found in this instance, using an external specialist team and effectively connecting with the internal teams enabled us to get fresh perspectives with additional freedom to explore through design discovery. PAUL MERRELL: It is about bringing in that team to give a fresh perspective, to take a new look at the evidence is to stand on the shoulders of the work that's already been done as that foundation to evolve the design and take it a little bit further and maybe bring in different ways of thinking, again empowered by the use of a multidisciplinary team. LAUREN ARGENTA: Lastly, work on the shared artefacts, where they are most accessible. DARIAN ECKERSLEY: We use tools across the organisation by getting the teams using that we could collaborate and share work more easily. LAUREN ARGENTA: Creating accessible places for all disciplines to access content is and was essential. As creatives, this means us stepping off of just the tools we use, so thinking about particularly other things. So finding ways on which the content we create can go and be housed into places that they are already going to was mission critical. In summary. PAUL MERRELL: Start off on the right foot and be multidisciplinary from
12. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 73 the beginning. LAUREN ARGENTA: Informing that team if you are that person creating them. Make sure you are finding ways for an onboarding to be inclusive in the short amount of time. Think about the services that you have in place that might prevent that and how you can work around to facilitate a seamless combination of skills from external, internal and across departments. PAUL MERRELL: Get that collaboration going with honest and open communication. Treat them as verbs rather than latitudes. LAUREN ARGENTA: Utilise the multiskill sets to keep the tension between desirable and feasible throughout and let people stay in their mode but come together to create all the bonds and all the translation ties across the whole process. PAUL MERRELL: Take a fresh look at the evidence and use this approach when you need that step change and make sure you are standing on - or using those foundations that are already there. LAUREN ARGENTA: Finally, be considerate to the broader teams when creating shared artefacts to ensure that the content is maximally accessible. PAUL MERRELL: Thank you, so much for having us. We do really wish we could be there with you. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Darian Eckersley, Jen Brown and the team at the Australian Digital Health Agency for the opportunity to collaborate on the project and the talk
13. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 74 today but also that great pushes of improving the health of all Australians. LAUREN ARGENTA: Thank you to you all for listening and we hope that we have some actionable go tos for you to take on as you move into these types of projects with these types of teams. Have a great day. PAUL MERRELL: Have fun. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: Thanks, Paul and Lauren. I hope you both feel much better very soon. Thank you. Our next speaker today is coming up on stage. Please join me in welcoming Fiona Armstrong. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: Thank you, very much. Over to you. FIONA ARMSTRONG: Thank you. I am delighted to be here this afternoon. It is such a pleasure to be able to be here in person and talking to everyone again. I wanted to share with you this afternoon some insights around how to design services in sensitive areas. Listening to all of the great presentations that we have heard this morning and early afternoon, it follows on nicely from a lot of the things that we have been talking about. My name is Fiona Armstrong. I work at Liquid Interactive. I wanted to share with you today some insights and learnings from my personal journey over the last 20 years of working in sensitive and complex topics. It is the first time I have pooled these together and try and distil learnings from a variety of projects, working across lots of different areas into a few principles and insights and takeaways for today. I will use some examples from areas as diverse as older Australians, mental health, bereavement