frog was approached by the biopharmaceutical company Immunomedics in the fall of 2017; they wanted to conduct opportunity finding into the realm of Triple Negative Breast Cancer. This certain type of breast cancer is more difficult to treat, and on average, women fail multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Immunomedics was developing an immunotherapy treatment, and wanted to find out how best to bring it to market, with both patients and caregivers.
Over 8 weeks, we conducted in-depth user research with both patients and caregivers. We were given the opportunity to do in home visits for patients, with our caregiver interviews being purely over the phone. We also spoke with subject matter experts, as well as professional researchers to better understand how to present our work.
The end result was a gallery of our research; we chose this medium due to the heavily emotional subject matter that we wanted to convey to the client.
Throughout the project, I co-led the research efforts, and was instrumental in creating the physical space due to my industrial design background.
Some of the courageous women we interviewed.
We wanted to truly represent the stories we’d heard and pay tribute to the women we spoke to - therefore, we didn’t want to just present our findings in a deck. We collaborated with Alletta Cooper, who has extensive experience bringing stories to life at places like StoryCorps. Working with her, we started to understand what interactive elements would best tell these women’s stories to make the most long term impact with the listeners.
In addition, we used the back wall of the room to project a journey map - this journey map was a combination of many of the stories we’d heard. We used audio to have the journey map come to life, and used After Effects to make it progress as the audio did. As visitors came into the room, they were greeted by this journey map, as well as a warm and welcoming atmosphere.
To have the gallery visitors gain further empathy towards our participants, we found artifacts that represented the stories they told us; for example, we found a marathon bib and used it on the vignette of a participant who got through her cancer treatment by running races.
Each artifact was situated on a vignette with an iPad; each iPad contained audio clippings that visitors could listen to. The audio was mixed with sound affects - for example, a woman spoke about riding a train to treatment, so we had the sound of the subway playing behind the audio.
The addition of the room we created heavily influenced our final concepting stage with our client; after experiencing the women’s stories in such a powerful way, they were much more inspired and open to future concepts.
