In 2007, there was an industrial designer from GE, called Mr. Doug Dietz. He had been working for two years to build the MRI machine. Finally, his design comes to fruition as it gets installed at the hospital. Like a proud papa Doug goes to see this machine. He is very happy with what he sees. A gleaming white machine in a sanitized room. Everything seems to be perfect, ‘the humming of the machine’, he thinks, ‘is a beautiful sound’. Just then the technician taps him on his shoulders and asks him to step out. “We have got some patients coming” he says. Doug steps into the hallway and sees a little girl with her parents coming through. When they come closer, he notices that the girl is crying. When they come even closer, he hears the father, who steps down to the child’s height and says, “Sweetie we’ve talked about this! You need to be brave.” As they enter the MRI room Doug follows in and as soon as the little girl enters the MRI room she starts howling. Doug leans forward it, sits down to her height and asks what’s the matter. She says “I’m very scared” and suddenly Doug sees this room now from the perspective of the little kid. He sees the yellow and black lines on the floor which show where you can walk and where you can’t, almost like an accident site. On the wall is a huge magnet with an exclamation mark and ‘DANGER’ written over it. The humming of the machine now sounds like a monster and the machine suddenly doesn’t look like the beautiful thing he had designed; it just looks like a giant brick with a hole in it. The girl is inconsolable, the parents look at each other with that look which says ‘how am I going to get this child through this’. At this point the technician says, ‘I think we need to sedate the child.’ As the process goes on Doug is heartbroken and he steps out and asks someone how many times does this happen? They say, “Almost always. We need to sedate close to 80% of the children.” Completely devastated Doug goes back to his lab and starts thinking about what he needs to do differently. Doug then starts meeting children, going to play schools and he realizes the power that they have in their imagination. In one school three chairs are put up with a blanket and he asks the kids what that is. One kid calls it a spacecraft another calls it an igloo and yet another calls it a boat. This gives him an inspiration. He decides that he needs to redesign that room almost as an adventure. They now installed a new machine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Hospital. They designed this room to be almost like a jungle adventure room where they have stickers on the ground of stepping stones. These stickers start from outside the MRI room and as kids come they make sure they are stepping only on the stickers because there is water and there are fishes all around. Once they go in, the entire assembly looks like a waterfall cave. There is a waterfall in the back with the sound of waterfall. You can smell fresh water and lavender. As they lower the machine it is a canoe instead of being the flatbed. The kids are told to get in the canoe and to stay still and only if they stay completely still some of the fishes might jump. So the kids comply and they’re given headphones and told that they need to focus and that cuts off the sound and this completely transforms the experience. The results are outstanding! From around 80% of kids that needed to go through sedation now lesser than 27% goes through sedation. In fact in the shorter version less than 3% go through sedation. Some of the readers may be wondering ‘isn’t that a lot of expense?’ Not at all! It breaks even very quickly because earlier they were to take 10 to 15 minutes to get a kid ready and 4 minutes in the MRI machine, now they need to take about 4 minutes to get the kid ready and 4 minutes in the MRI machine. The throughput has suddenly increased and the satisfaction levels are at 92%. Doug is elated one day when he’s in one of these rooms talking to the one of the parents whose child has just got off the MRI machine. He is asking about what they were going through as feedback. He sees that the girl comes and tugs the mothers skirt once, twice and finally the mom pays attention. She looks down and asks, “What is it dear?” and the girl asks in response, “Can we come back tomorrow?” Doug starts crying that day and he realizes that he had finally transformed something into an experience. Initially as a designer he was looking if he can get it faster or cheaper, whereas the patients were looking at the overall experience. What a brilliant story! Business Points – Tags #Userperspective #experience #customercentric #Customerperspective #Fieldvisit #marketvisit #design #thinking #MRI
