Tailoring the Scope (Updates)

Design Planning and Ideation

User Activities & Interactive Tasks

Supply Room Tablet Interface

• Users can scan their ID badges to access a personalized dashboard, along with the search tab.

For Patient Care Staff

• View assigned patients

  • Nurses, doctors, and other patient care technicians, they can see their an alphabetized list of assigned patients. 

• Select a patient

  • Users can tap on a specific patient to view that patient's current orders and upcoming tasks

• Identify required tasks

  • Users can review patient-specific orders to determine exactly which supplies they need to gather.

• Locate patient-specific items

  • Users can tap the “Find Item(s)” button from the patient detail view to trigger the corresponding bin beacons, causing them to light up and emit a sound for easy identification.

For Supply Managers and Stockers

• Monitor low-stock items

• • Users can view a list highlighting items running low on stock. 

• Check overall inventory

  • Users can browse through a cumulative list of all supplies in the room and see their detailed information and stock count. 

• Update stock counts

  • After restocking items, users can manually update inventory counts. 

• View restock requests

  • Users can access the notifications tab to read messages submitted by staff requesting a restock of supplies.

• Manage supply settings

  • Users can use the configuration tab to adjust bin scale settings, check beacon batteries, and manage other stock-related information.

Search Tab

• The search tab offers multiple ways to locate supplies: Voice, Text, and Images.

  • Initiate a voice search

    • Say “Hey LuxCopia” or tap the microphone icon on the tablet.

  • Enter a text query

    • Select the search bar or tap the 'T' icon to bring up a digital keyboard. 

  • Browse visual categories

    • Tap the image icon to explore and filter items through visual categories, similar to grocery store search systems.

• View item details 

  • Tap a specific item to see detailed information, location, and stock count. 

• Locate a specific item

  • Tap the "Find Item(s)" button to locate trigger the corresponding bin beacons. 

Multi-User Interaction 

• Identify bins by user color

  • When multiple users are in the supply room, the backlight of each tablet will glow a different color that will be associated to the relevant bins. 

• Locate your assigned supplies 

  • Users can follow the color-coded bins associated with their tablet backlight to avoid confusion.

• • Example

    • Nurse 1's tablet has a blue backlight -> bins light up blue -> supplies for Nurse 1

    • Nurse 2's tablet has a red backlight -> bins light up red -> supplies for Nurse 2

Out-of-Stock Workflows

• Receive out-of-stock alerts

  • Users are notified if an item is unavailable.

• Mark bins as empty

  • Users can manually indicate a bin is empty on the tablet.

• Request a restock

  • Users can tap the “Request Restock” button and have the option to include a short message.

• Find alternative location

  • Users can view other supply rooms that have the item in stock.

• Notify Materials Management

  • Submitting a restock request sends an instant notification to the Materials Management Department.

Ideation (Sketching) and Critiquing Process

Our ideation and critiquing process grew directly from of our previous analysis work. In Phase 2, our contextual analysis, interviews, and design-informing models showed that hospital supply rooms were a major friction point in everyday healthcare work. Staff often had to rely on memory, ask others for help, or spend extra time searching through bins and rooms for supplies. Those findings gave us a clear design target. Rather than designing around a more general “nurse wall” concept, we shifted our focus to the supply room because it was a more realistic, under-supported, and high-impact issue to address.

Sketching was our main diverging activity. Once we identified the core tasks LuxCopia needed to support, we generated many different ideas for how those tasks could work. We sketched and discussed alternatives for logging in, identifying supplies by patient or procedure, searching for one-off items, handling out-of-stock cases, navigating to the correct bin, and supporting inventory management. We explored multiple directions and built on each others' ideas. This helped us compare different workflows and think through the tradeoffs between speed, clarity, and usefulness in a real hospital setting.

Critiquing was the converging activity that helped us decide which ideas were worth keeping. After finishing our sketches, we stepped back and considered whether each concept would prove effective in an actual hospital setting. We looked closely at whether an idea would reduce searching, lower cognitive load, fit naturally into a busy shift, and avoid creating extra steps for clinicians. This is where the connection to our earlier analysis mattered most. Our analysis gave us a standard for judging ideas: if a feature did not address an issue brought up during our interviews or if it didn't comport well with our understanding of the hospital's work environment, it needed to be revised or removed.

This process helped us make more grounded design choices for key tasks. For example, we chose to keep the patient-centered dashboard because it matches how clinicians already think about their work and helps group supplies around practical tasks. We also kept multi-modal search because users may remember items in different ways - by name, by appearance, or by association with a patient or procedure. At the same time, we moved away from designs that depended too heavily on manual inventory updates, since that would add more work to an already busy environment. Instead, we converged on a design that combined the simple tablet interactions with physical room cues, such as color-matched lighting and illuminated bins, to make the system easy to follow in practice.

Poster presentations were an important part of this critique process. Presenting our ideas publicly forced us to clearly explain LuxCopia and defend why each design choice mattered. That feedback helped us notice where parts of the design were still too complicated, unclear, or unrealistic. For example, a common concern raised by our audience involved the scenario where multiple users intend to use the system. Although we considered that situation during our ideation process, presenting our project made it clear that this was our top breaking point. So at our next meeting, our group prioritized this issue and converged around solutions such as using different lights for different user sessions, providing multiple tablets, and adding functionality to the supply bins themselves. Poster presentations pushed us to think more carefully about issues like multi-user confusion in the supply room, whether the transition from tablet to physical bin felt seamless, and which features were truly essential to the system’s core value. In that sense, the poster presentations were not separate from the design process - they were one of the main ways we tested whether our sketches made sense to other people.

Overall, our ideation and critiquing processes worked together to produce the design of our system. Our previous analysis identified the problem space, sketching helped us explore many possible solutions, and critique helped us narrow those ideas into a more coherent direction. That process is what led us to LuxCopia’s final concept: a supply-room support system utilizing supply bin lights to help clinicians quickly identify what they need for their patients, understand where it is, and retrieve it with less searching, less guesswork, and less stress.

Workplace and Materials Used

During one of our meetings in the Wednesday UX Studio, we sat at one of the hexagon shaped tables, discussed what the most important features to consider for our system were, and created sketches based on our ideas. Members, individually, also created sketches at home to present at the next meeting at the same location. One member chose to create their sketch digitally through Goodnotes but the rest of the group opted to create theirs with paper and pencil.

Photos of Team at Work 

Designer's Mental Model

Conceptual Design

Our conceptual design is the mapping layer between the designer’s mental model and the user’s mental model. The goal is not to explain all of the hidden system logic. The goal is to present LuxCopia in a way that feels natural to the user, guiding them towards their objective so that there's less friction in having to decode how the system works.

To bridge this gap, we relied on metaphors and affordances. Voice search is modeled after familiar voice assistants, image browsing works like a grocery store checkout catalog, and grouped patient views reduce the burden of remembering every individual supply item. Repeated color cues across tablets and illuminated bins make the system’s logic visible in the room, while clear item states such as “in stock” or “out of stock” help users understand what the system is telling them at a glance. In this way, the conceptual design translates backend logic into visible, easy-to-follow visual cues that support the high-pressure environment of hospitals. 

Conceptual Design Process

Our conceptual design process began after we developed our Designer’s Mental Model and revisited key findings from our contextual analysis, interviews, client feedback, and design-informing models. From there, we asked what parts of LuxCopia had to be communicated clearly in order for the user’s mental model to match the designer’s. We organized the conceptual design into the three perspectives - interaction, emotional, and ecological - because each one reveals a different part of the system that would otherwise stay implicit. The interaction perspective shows the main user-facing screens and decision paths. The emotional perspective shows how the system changes the user’s feelings in a stressful workflow. The ecological perspective shows how LuxCopia fits into the broader hospital environment and how it connects to external systems such as EPIC, ID badges, and smart supply bins.

Our earlier ideation directly informed this stage. We had already explored patient-based supply suggestions, voice/text/image search, low-stock notifications, and light-up bins. In the conceptual design stage the focus was not on adding more features, but on presenting those features in ways that would immediately make sense to users. We therefore leaned on familiar interface patterns and affordances: microphone, text, and image icons for search. For tablets and bins we added grouped item categories, visible item states, and color-matched lighting. These decisions were meant to make LuxCopia feel learnable and trustworthy even though the underlying system might be complex.

Main Breaking Points

One of the biggest breaking points in our design was supporting multiple users in the supply room at the same time. Because LuxCopia does not only display information on a tablet but also highlights physical bins in the room, shared use could easily become confusing. Users might not know which highlighted supplies belong to them. To address this, we designed each tablet with its own color and matched that color to the illuminated bins, so each user can quickly follow their own guidance in a shared environment.

Another important breaking point was learnability. From the designer’s perspective, it makes sense that users can search by patient, procedure, voice, text, or image and then follow the system’s cues. But users may not immediately understand how these options work, what the colors mean, or why supplies are grouped the way they are. We addressed this by using familiar metaphors and affordances, such as voice assistant-style interaction, shopping-style image browsing, familiar icons, grouped menus, and repeated color cues across both the tablet and the room. We also considered placing a poster in the room next to the tablet that explains the controls of the system.

We also identified error prevention as a major breaking point. In a hospital supply room, the system cannot only be fast; it also has to be trustworthy. If a bin contains the wrong item, if stock information is inaccurate, or if the interface leads the user to the wrong place, the system becomes frustrating and potentially unsafe to rely on. For this reason, our design includes item detail views, quantity visibility, clear bin illumination, and inventory-updating features to reduce mismatches between what the system says and what the user actually finds.

Finally, we saw a major tension in keeping the system simple enough that clinicians will actually use it, but not so simple that it becomes useless. A featureless interface would not solve any real problems, but an overloaded interface would feel like extra work. Our design therefore focuses on making the most common actions fast and clear, while still including practical support like multi-modal search, out-of-stock handling, and role-specific views when needed.

Some wonderful additional breakdown points/remarks that classmates brought up during Design Studio included:

"If there are three different nurses in the supply room at the same time, how might the color-coded light/audio wayfinding system break down or cause confusion?"

• To mitigate, this there would be multiple colors of lights on each bin and when a nurse initiates a search on the appropriate tablet, the system lights up in that specific color (Tablet A is Blue, Tablet B is Pink). The lights will pulse in that specific user’s color.

"Is the transition from the tablet search to the physical bin seamless, or does it feel like an extra step compared to just grabbing an item off a shelf?"

• This is a fantastic point, and it would be seamless  since once the user taps to show their respective items, the rooms lights up. While it is a fair concern, the time spent of a couple seconds clicking through saves them much more than if they had manually searched over time. Perhaps in the future models, the system can pre-light the bins for a scheduled procedure as soon as a nurse enters the room using their badge and bluetooth recognition. This further change could make the technology feel like a supportive part of the environment rather than a separate task.

"If you were a hospital administrator, what would be your biggest hesitation in investing in or installing this hardware?" (more high-level, less design focused) and "If we had to strip this system down to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which features—the voice search, the weight scales, or the predictive dashboard—could we drop first without losing the core value?"

• Another great point regarding administrator hesitation. Our system would be using a modular approach with bins that can be added as time goes on. Seeing the initial investment in the most frequently used bisn could help. The Weight Scales and Beacons provide the data needed by the managers, and more complex features like Voice Search could be added later as needed. Overall, while designing the system, we primarily focused on the functionality over cost and implementation restraints from an administrative view.

Scenarios and Storyboards

Scenario 1 (Frontline Clinician):

Parker Schultz, a frontline clinician, is in the middle of a packed shift when one of Parker’s assigned patients needs to do a dressing on a patient. A specialist also asks Parker to retrieve several supplies to perform an operation. Parker has to move quickly, remember several different supplies, and avoid making an extra trip back to the supply room. In the past, that often meant opening multiple drawers, second-guessing what was missing, and sometimes grabbing extra items “just in case.”

Parker goes to the supply room and badges into LuxCopia at the tablet. The system shows Parker’s assigned patients, so Parker selects the correct patient and taps the dressing kit. Instead of forcing Parker to remember the location of every individual component, LuxCopia automatically groups the needed supplies and turns on pink lights at the correct bins. Parker follows the lights and quickly collects most of the items. Parker gets the items without wasting time, returns with the complete set of supplies, and feels less pressure to hoard backup items because the system is transparent and dependable.

Scenario 2 (Supply Manager):

Supply Manager Chen has been tasked with doing an inventory check of all the supply rooms on the floor.  As he walks into his first supply room, he notices the LuxCopia tablet and decides to give it a try. After logging in and tapping through, he realizes that this tablet is extremely convenient and helpful as it saves him so much time  trying to figure out which items are close to being out of stock. 

While examining the dashboard displayed on the tablet, he suddenly receives a notification on the right side of the dashboard,  a notification which came from a Nurse Practitioner who requested an extra large order for Gauze , specifically 30 for which only 12 were available. The left side of the LuxCopia tablet already notifies on when stock is low, however in certain cases in which a decently full bin isn't enough for clinicians working on the frontline, he realizes they can request for more items as needed. With this information at hand Chen decides to prioritize the direct request of this nurse before starting his routine check. He goes to a room which houses medical supplies used to replenish the Supply Room,  picks up a boxful of gauze, and with his scanned in tablet begins refilling the bin it directed him to. As he finished, he completed the action on his tablet, allowing his work to update automatically within the system; he then reflected on how the LuxCopia tablet's Supply Manager Dashboard had not only kept him informed about the state of the Supply Room, but had also informed him on the needs of the clinicians who relied on it each day.

Storyboard Process

Figma Wireframe 

If the embed does not work below, please use the following link  to view the below design. 

There are two main workflows: The frontline clinician and supply staff. Due to Figma design constraints, we could not put more than one interaction of the same type on the same page, meaning the supply staff workflow starts at the signed in screen. Note that regardless of position, all users will be met with the home screen present in the frontline clinician workflow before signing in for personalized views.