Hold seeks to relieve the hassle of waiting on hold by utilising AI to stay on hold for the user, and keep them up to date on their position in the queue.
Everyone’s experienced it, you need to call your GP or a business to make an appointment or to ask a quick question and the first information you’re given is that you are 44th in the phone queue. After that, it’s anyone's guess as to how long the wait could be, and suddenly half your day is taken up by trying to make a phone call.
In an ideal world, no one would have to wait in a queue, however, Hold provides a solution not to remove queuing, but to alleviate it.
But first;
| Project | IxD 301 Project 1 - Smartwatch: Design a smartwatch app ideally to solve a problem |
|---|---|
| Users | Relative to the chosen area |
| My Role | Research, Development, Design |
| Scope | Smartwatch-based, minimum 3 screens, reasonable speculative design can be used |
To start the project off, I took part in a group ideation workshop, where we came up with ideas around problems in certain sectors of life. Our group explored the ideas of health, transport, politics, and education. After mind mapping, we reviewed our work to try and find connections that could spawn new ideas could be found. Some of the connections we found included; Uber and A+E; Voter ID and authenticator apps; and GP wait times and AI. The last idea; GP wait times and AI; caught my imagination.
One of the problems identified was the amount of time you have to spend waiting to get through on the phone to GPs. I had a slight idea that this might be solvable in some way with AI. To find out more about this issue, I interviewed a friend who I knew had experienced this issue and created a user persona and empathy map from it which helped me realise what the main frustrations were. I also wrote user stories to build the themes from the empathy map into more practical scenarios.
The amount of time you have to wait on the phone to get through to your GP is absurd, and completely impractical to fit into everyday life. I want to find a solution to help this issue through a smartwatch app, possibly using an AI component.
The next step in this project was to research the concept and my users. I created a user persona and empathy map to help me understand who I was designing for and wrote user stories to explore what I wanted to achieve further. I also researched in apps with a similar concept, and called GPs and businesses to build a current state user flow of calling a busy line.
When I call the GP reception.
I want to not have to wait on hold.
So I can get on with my life.