Excelscope: a Malaria scanner for Nigerian Pharmacists
Delft University of Technology - Project: User Experience and Usability Assessment in Design.
Xiaomin Li, Samira Miccolis, Martina Pozzoni, Wietse Bosch, Cynthia Ko
In Nigeria, 40% of deaths are caused by Malaria. To get diagnosed, people in rural areas need to go to specialised medical centres which can be far away. Therefore, customers often go to a local pharmacist to get antimalaria drugs. Sometimes these are prescribed even though it is not certain whether the customer has Malaria or not.
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The Excelscope is an economical Malaria scanner which uses the lens of a smartphone as a microscope. Previous designs were mostly focussed on doctors, but this project focussed on the pharmacists as they are the first point of contact in rural areas. The aim of the UX redesign was to change a pharmacist's behaviour of over-diagnosing Malaria.
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I was mainly involved in: project management, design research and team-wide conceptualisation.
Storyboard and context of usage
 Initial patient encounter:Inserting patient data and taking a blood sample. |  Preparing the blood sample. |  Analysing the blood sample:Taking a proper microscopic image and waiting for the results. |
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Excelscope's features
 Excelscope |  Attention to ergonomics |  Detaill of digital interface |
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Design Process
 The Excelscope evolution:from the original Excelscope to multiple redesigns. |  Design process:iterative and user-centered. |  Paper protoypes:testing initial physical and digital interfaces with medical students. |
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 Final usability test:testing the physical and digital interface with professional pharmacists and medical students |  Design by doing:from low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototypes. |
What's next?
Taking the redesign into context
The Excelscope's project owner (Dr. Ir. J.C. Diehl) and his research team have already taken our digital interface to Nigeria: the first impressions seem fruitful. Users found the interface intuitive in use and its steps easy to follow (although, as experienced in our own user tests with pharmacists in the Netherlands, some icons and wordings could be improved).
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Since there are currently multiple versions of the Excelscope, Dr. Diehl' s research team will start integrating all of the students' concepts and hopefully the Excelscope will go into production the coming few years.
What did I learn about?
Usability research: preparing and conducting usability tests, interviewing techniques, qualitative data collection and analysis.
User Interface design: storyboards, wireframing, flowcharts. The UI design was a collective effort through ideation and conceptualisation, but the final digital and physical UI design was produced by Xiaomin Li and Samira Miccolis.
Project management: SCRUM method, planning, effective leadership, team dynamics.