Angry Balls Patient Simulation
At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, we were charged with redesigning the outpatient experience for pediatric patients, families, and providers. One focus area in the broader project was improving waiting in the patient journey. Doctors and caregivers knew unpredictable waiting was a common and undesirable part of the patient experience, especially for sick children. Yet, everyone had a different sense of just how big the problem was and few had a true sense of what it felt like to the patients and families experiencing it. We needed to build some empathy in order to create the urgency for change.
The Angry Balls simulation provoked seasoned healthcare providers to see and feel the patient experience anew, with one whispering, “Oh sh*t!” upon seeing it.
Design Process
Our team spent time with patients, caregivers, and medical providers to understand the St. Jude outpatient system and its effects on each type of person in it. We then used the hospital’s actual data to create a simulation that illustrated where and how bottlenecks formed, causing wait times to escalate. Toggles on the simulation allowed users to test different constraints based on actual conditions in the hospital. The team graphically represented patients with small colored balls that moved through the process into different stages. The breakthrough came by making those balls shake (later, affectionately dubbed “Angry Balls”) when they were made to wait for long periods of time.
Personal contributions: The team was having great fun modeling different ways to visualize the data but saw this as an exploratory tool for internal use only. I spotted the opportunity to further develop it and use it as the thrust of an executive stakeholder presentation so that we could “show, not tell” the reality of the patient experience to an audience that was almost numb to the data because they were so familiar with it. To get there, I provided design critiques to the team and encouraged them to play off each discipline’s strengths to bring the data visualization to life. I incorporated learnings from my past experience as a hospital administrator to guide the team on tone and key messages when presenting Angry Balls to clinical staff and executive administration.
Design Outcomes
Upon seeing this visualization, nurses and staff proclaimed, “THAT is exactly what it feels like to patients and to us.” The simulation conveys a familiar clinical problem through a captivating empathetic lens. It was a big moment of mutual understanding across administration, clinical staff, and families, and instantly validated the urgency of the problem to solve. “Angry Balls” has become the go-to example in IDEO marketing and business development efforts to illustrate the power of bringing Data Science, Software Design, and Interaction Design together for powerful storytelling with few words.
User name: ideo PW: 3Gqk4RYgGxrCSxyw
Deliverables | Simulation as part of client design meeting
Roles | Client leader, healthcare guide
Acknowledgements | St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital