User experience in mountaineering: a parallel to medical device design
Published: November 2024
Grant Howarth, Interaction Design Consultant
Continuing our exploration of the inspiration of personal interests and passions for medical device design at Shore, we shift our attention from the parallels between Bex’s tennis and wearable technology to a discussion with Interaction Design Consultant, Grant.
What's your passion?
I’m obsessed with hillwalking and mountaineering; I spend way too much time poring over maps, and imagining adventures and the more time I spend up in the mountains and nature the better. I’m proud to have recently joined the ‘Compleatists’ or ‘Munroists’ as I’ve bagged all 282 Munros and 226 subsidiary Munro Tops across Scotland (I’m going to have to find another hobby to focus on now!)
What bit of kit do you have admiration for, from a user experience or design perspective?
I’m going to cheat and list three – map, compass and mobile GPS apps, in particular the Ordnance Survey OSMaps app.
Has this influenced your work in any way?
In mountaineering, paper maps have long been used to plan routes, spot potential hazards and are a tool to track your progress across terrain, allowing you to stay on track even in adverse weather.
In the design of medical devices, apps and healthcare experiences, we use ‘maps’ in a sense when we plan user journeys and the user interfaces that ‘navigate’ our products. Just like when out on the hills, we use these maps to agree on the planned experience, anticipate and mitigate risks, leading to desired outcomes. Any time spent planning will help you as you progress through a project, keep you on track, and your end destination in sight.
Advances in digital mapping apps, such as the OSMaps app, bring even more utility to maps. The digital layer allows you to visualise the route in 3D much more easily and allows you to view up-to-date satellite data, pull in localised weather data or even to calculate the exact distance you will be travelling and the total ascent. Digital maps also allow you to leverage data from other users, for example to see fellow mountaineers’ routes or share your planned route with others, so the planning experience becomes a collaborative process.
Like the benefits that come with digitising maps, we can also augment physical healthcare experiences with digital layers. For example, we can track the times and values of blood sugar results, identify trends, and surface that information in context-specific messaging to help users understand the meaning of their results (as we did in the Verio Reflect® project).
Ultimately, the digital layer in the context of healthcare can elevate physical experiences by leveraging many sources of data allowing you to obtain a complete picture of your health and wellbeing.
What inspiration or appreciation do other designers and engineers get from the kit that facilitates their passions? See more from the team in the links below, along with more UX & UI insights from Grant.
