Design

Design System

As we are creating many different designs and solutions, our team wanted to ensure consistency across our designs by developing and implementing a design system. This design system includes the necessary building blocks to build our design solutions: a cohesive color palette as well as a typography set.

Colors

For our base colors, we wanted to choose vibrant colors that have a high contrast. This is because we knew when designing for the IHDD, we wanted to use bright colors that would be eye catching and add more of a family friendly feel to the older building. We wanted to emphasize fun in hopes of contrasting some of the stress and heavier emotions that patients and visitors may experience while they are at the UW IHDD. For our secondary colors we opted for softer and lighter versions to support our base colors. We also chose to use black and deep navy as our text colors as well as a soft cream for our background color.

Typography

For our fonts, we chose Rubik One as our display font, League Spartan as our heading font, and Arial for our two body font styles.

Rubik One is a bold yet soft font that is timeless. Using that font as our display font is synonymous and symbolic of the work that is done at the UW IHDD.

League Spartan has a rounded yet strong type design which we found fitting for the IHDD and for our heading texts.

Arial

For our body font, we wanted a simple and reliable font family so we chose Arial.

Character Designs

As a family-friendly navigation tool, we developed two distinct characters to guide patients and visitors to where they need to go.

Hartman

Hartman is a simplistic heart-shaped character who was originally meant to navigate people to the 2nd floor check-in desk and waiting room. He is a goofy prankster that really enjoys talking to people of all ages. Hartman has a simple heart-shaped body with long arms and legs that can move around in all kinds of directions. He has a constant smile on his face and is made to be able to walk and dance in any direction he needs to go. His character design creates a sense that he’s fun, aloof, groovy, and always looking to have a good time while getting to where he needs to go.

Starling

Starling is a simplistic star-shaped character who was originally meant to navigate people to the bathrooms. Starling is always willing to help and provide assistance. He is one of a kind and loves to spend time with kids as well as socialize with everyone who comes to say hi! Starling has a simple star-shaped body with shorter legs and arms coming out of his side, with a more comfortable, calmer stance. His character design creates a sense that he’s cute, fun, and merry and always wants to skip alongside you as he takes you where you need to go.

As we mentioned in our evaluation, we made the decision to solely use Starling as our navigational aid and transitioned to him leading visitors the check in desk.

Low Fidelity Prototypes

High Fidelity Prototypes

Directory Signage

The new directory signage we produced removed information we felt was unnecessary for visitors such as office numbers and staff stations. We felt that staff members are already aware of the locations of their work stations. We also wanted to highlight information that would lead visitors to the check in desk. While we created a template for the relevant information on the directory, we wanted to explore different designs which incorporated an aspect of fun. We aim to conduct further research to see which version of the directory visitors and staff at the UW IHDD would prefer. 

Bathroom Signage

We redesigned the bathroom signs for all three floors in order to make them more child-friendly, functional and add standardization across floors. Our new bathroom signs aim to solve the issue of visitors being confused as to whether or not they're at the appropriate restroom. The older restroom signs are outdated and don't reflect the current functionality of the restroom as restrooms with changing tables don't say "family restroom" and gender neutral restrooms are mislabeled.