Design workshop for Patient Information | 1000 Lives Plus

Written by Rose-Innes Designs on 4th July, 2012

A large collaborative group of senior consultants, nurses, physiotherapists and occupational therapists met at Swalec Stadium for the sixth meeting of this sort. Michelle was recommended to the team leaders of the collaborative group by Dr Alan Willson, Head of the Wales Centre for Quality Improvement. She gave a small seminar and workshop on how to improve the design of patient-facing information.

The health care experts in the group are faced with the frequent problem of designing their own literature on the office PC, using MS Word or Publisher. Despite their best efforts, the result of years' worth of the handing down of previous leaflets, which has been added to–both in terms of information and design–tends to be messy and ineffective for their patients. This is due to a lack of funding for the proper resources within a public funded industry.

“My presentation covered things like the basics of good information design, design principles, the importance of planning and hierarchy, some of the technical terms for print houses and most importantly – defining and knowing your target audience.”

“For the workshop, I introduced the use of personas, which is a common tool used in service design and something we have used succesfully in data gathering and understanding the customer for a recent financial services projects. Through workshops of 10 groups from different health boards, I had them create patient personas, through which they viewed a collection of leaflets and information from the patients' perspective. This encouraged the experts to discover issues of legibility, type contrast, which content to clarify and which to disregard and use of imagery. There was an understanding and enthusiam to start putting these principles into practice, which is fantastic.”

Hi Michelle,
 
I just wanted to say a big thank you for yesterday. Your session was very informative and pitched well for the audience. I think the exercise worked really well – the table discussions were very animated and everyone seemed really engaged in the task. The feedback I received during the rest of the day was very positive – so well done.
 
Kind regards

Julie