Identify groups:
What information would support or refute your argument? Statistics such as
- Two thirds of blindness and visual impairment occurs in women
- Three quarters of visual impairment is estimated to be preventable or correctable
- One third of age-related macular disease and cataract may be due to smoking
- Four fifths of blindness and visual impairment occurs in developing countries
Who has this information?
- Eye care providers
- Eye health organizations: Women's Eye Health.org, Prevent Bliness America
- Campaigns: National Eye Health Awareness Campaigns
- National Consumers League
How can these groups be reached? E-mail or interview the executive director of PBA or Gale Unger (Schepens Eye Research Institute)
Eye health care reform
Stakeholders
Women: two thirds of blindness and visual impairment occurs in women.
Low-income young workers: cannot afford eye health care for doctor visits.
Developing countries: In developing countries, four fifths of blindness and visual impairment occurs and in some area for women have less access to medical care.
Doctors: to prevent or correct these issues.
Uninsured: seeks eye health care to prevent or correct visual impairment.
Illegal immigrants: seeks eye health care to prevent or correct visual impairment without seeing a doctor.
Design research plan and tool:
Setting Goals/objective: To develop a product or a service to address the issues and to figure out the needs that relevant to users
1. Collect issues: field observations
2. Make a list of the goals and issues: user perceptions
- satisfaction
- ease-of-use
- customer/user needs
3. Collect research materials already conducted: facts, surveys and interviews
- www.womenshealth.org
- www.preventblindness.org
4. Prioritize the goals
- increase eye health awareness
Recruiting: gathering resources
1. Determining the target audience
- women
- those have less access to medical care
2. Finding representative
- eye health doctors
- organizations
- awareness campaigns
Product development stages
1. Design
2. Build
3. Usability test: The goal is to investigate two main customer/users using the potential product/service: 1) Women seek eye health care to prevent or correct visual impairment and 2) those have less access to medical care.
1 comment:
Hi YooRi,
Thanks for this post. Sorry it has taken me a long time to respond. Of course, I am very interested in your topic. For a long time, I have been trying to figure out how to develop products that can serve this market. There is a vast number of visually impaired people in the developing world, and for the most part, they are ignored and forced to live lives in very dire conditions. In many countries, the blind are only able to survive by begging. Of course, the difficulty is how to provide them with tools they need to learn a trade or otherwise manage to earn a living. In some countries, blind people are directed to certain jobs, such as masseur or piano tuner, that are considered manageable by them in spite of their disability. some people even think that blindness makes one a better masseur, I suppose because you tend to be more sensitive with your hands, or maybe because people don't mind getting naked in front of them (!). Your decision to focus on women experiencing visual function loss in the developing world makes sense from the perspective of market size, however I am not sure that their needs are that different from men going through this disastrous situation. How would a product that was helpful for women not also be good for men?
Also, please clarify your intentions regarding the nature of the design intervention you are considering: is it something that reminds people of proper eye care and other behaviors that may minimize the chances of going blind, or are you interested, rather, in developing a product that would help a person who went blind to cope with this problem? Those are probably two entirely different projects, so you need to be clear which one you will be tackling.
Anyway, I am really glad that you are working on this, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
steven
Post a Comment