Our team was tasked with designing and developing a product that was assist in the use of emergency medicine. As opioid drugs have become an increasingly prominent cause of death in the United States, we decided to create a product that would assist in the use of Narcan, an opioid antagonist drug that reverses the effects of opiod drugs and can prevent death in the event of an overdose.
Our goal was to design a product that would allow rapid public access to Narcan. To achieve this goal, we conducted research on emergency technlogy used in public spaces such as AED kits and existing Narcan kits.
We also conducted interviews and questionnaires to collect data to identify potential stakeholders of this project. From this we identified our potential users and developed user personas.
After conducting our initial research, we developed two prototypes of different sizes.
From our prototypes, we chose the larger box to further develop as the extra space allowed for more opportunities to assist users in administering the Narcan drug effectively.
One of the main benefits of our chosen prototype was that it allowed for the display of a direction card. This instruction card allowed for users who may not be familiar with how to administer Narcan to follow instructions in the event of an emergency.
After further developing our prototype, we conducted a task analysis to trace how our product would be utilized in the event of an emergency. We used this task analysis to refine our design and prevent potential missteps in its implementation.
Afterward, we conducted a risk analysis on our design to identify potential resk factors and mitigate them. We selected five of the most prominent risks that we identified and implemented strategies to make our product safer to use. For example, one failure mode that was identified was th risk of a user cutting their finger on an edge of the kit (#2 in the chart). To mitigate this, we decided to polish and smooth out the edges of the kit.
The black circles indicate initial risk and the grey circles indicate risk after each factor was mitigated.
Due to COVID-19, we were unable to conduct any further user testing in person. Instead, we decided to shoot a video demonstrating how to use the NarKit. We then sent the video along with a pre-video and a post-video survey to gather feedback on the usability of the kit.
The feedback that we gathered indicated that most users felt that the NarKit was easy to use and that the instructions were clear. However, the users felt it was unclear what actions should be taken after the Narcan was administered.
To solve this shortcoming, we designed a new instructions card to install into the NarKit.
