Everyday life is surrounded by sound: the laughter of friends, the hum of traffic, or the sudden slam of a door. While many auditory events gradually fade into the background, certain sounds carry profound personal significance, shaping emotions and behaviors. For most people, sounds enrich their experiences, yet for others, the same sounds can become a source of discomfort or even distress.
Sounds can evoke various emotional reactions based on their perceived meaning rather than their acoustical properties. A soundscape refers to the acoustic environment as perceived by humans in context, evoking different responses based on its perceived meaning. Hyperacusis, is a condition where individuals experience heightened sensitivity to sounds, leading to distress, fear, and avoidance behaviors. Their responses to sounds involve both subconscious physiological reactions and conscious behavioral adaptations.
Emotional appraisal theory emphasizes that the emotional responses of individuals are not determined solely by the stimulus themselves, but by how they cognitively interpret or "construct" the situation in relation to their goals, beliefs and intentions(Lazarus, 1991).
Persuasive gamification design has emerged as a potential therapeutic approach, using game world engagement to facilitate behavior transformation in real world. By gamifying the unconscious dynamic soundscape appraisal process, games could potentially create a controlled, interactive environment that helps dose sound-sensitive individuals adjust to distressing sounds.
However, this theoretical perspective has yet to be incorporated into existing interventions. Furthermore, there is a lack of design guidance on how to structure such interventions based on relevant theories. This project therefore aims to address this challenge by focusing on understanding and meeting the needs of sound-sensitive individuals, including those with hyperacusis, from a design perspective. By progressively constructing a gamified world that reflects their experiences, the project will encourage self-awareness and facilitate the gradual acceptance of external soundscapes.

The Improving Improvement Toolkit (iitoolkit.com) is an online platform created to support healthcare professionals, designers, and researchers in strengthening healthcare improvement practices. Although it provides valuable resources—such as tools, frameworks, activities—its current structure has been experienced as complex and unintuitive. Users often struggle to locate content, understand its purpose, and apply it effectively within their projects.

This graduation project focuses on redesigning the website’s information architecture to improve clarity, findability, and usability for healthcare designers. An expanded Double Diamond design approach was applied, using methods including content inventory and audit, card sorting, tree testing, user interviews and usability testing. Nine participants with varying levels of expertise in healthcare design were recruited to identify core usability issues and clarify user needs. Their feedback revealed problems in navigation, terminology, and categorization, as well as the absence of clear entry points tailored to different user groups.

Based on these findings, a revised structure was developed and tested through tree testing, usability evaluations and interview with eleven participants. Results showed increased task success rates, reduced confusion, and stronger alignment with user expectations.

The project concludes with design recommendations for structuring digital toolkits that balance conceptual knowledge with actionable guidance. By Reorganizing navigation and clarifying content presentation, the redesigned information architecture enhances accessibility and supports more effective use of the toolkit for healthcare designers.

The integration of digital technologies and design thinking is reshaping the healthcare industry, necessitating tools that can support designers in navigating complex, multi-stakeholder environments. This thesis presents the development of a toolkit specifically designed for digital health designers to facilitate shared design goals among diverse stakeholders. The toolkit addresses key challenges identified through case studies of 14 existing toolkits, as well as structured interviews with healthcare designers.

The research began by classifying current design toolkits, revealing that many focus primarily on ideation while offering limited support for earlier stages such as stakeholder alignment and goal definition. Existing toolkits often take a card-based format, though there is a growing trend towards digital tools, particularly in response to the shift towards remote collaboration.

Structured interviews with both novice and experienced digital health designers highlighted critical challenges in stakeholder engagement. These included difficulties in creating a common understanding, managing conflicting values, and setting realistic goals. The need for toolkits to facilitate clear communication, organize complex insights, and align expectations was emphasized. Participants also expressed preferences for toolkits that are easy to use, adaptable, and reusable, with many advocating for a digital version.

In response, this thesis developed a toolkit that addresses the complexities of coordinating multiple stakeholders in digital health design projects. The toolkit features a Honeycomb diagram structured around seven key dimensions, guiding designers through the process of defining clear, achievable design goals. It aids in co-creation and brainstorming sessions, organizes thoughts, and serves as a visual communication tool for tracking project progress and reviewing stakeholder alignment.

The toolkit was evaluated by six design students with digital health experience, who tested its usability and usefulness. Feedback indicated that the toolkit effectively facilitated collaboration, structured the design process, and improved confidence in managing stakeholder relationships. However, participants also suggested areas for improvement, including the development of a digital version and clearer instructions. In response, a final digital version of the toolkit was created, offering greater flexibility and enhanced support for remote collaboration. This toolkit aims to empower digital health designers in achieving cohesive, stakeholder-aligned design goals.

You, I and almost everyone deal with illness under a certain condition. As digital health is becoming ever more widespread nowadays, this change shapes a new understanding of our medical experience. Consider how these new digital tools might affect patient experience becomes more crucial for everyone’s life. Four studies, aiming at understanding and enhancing the patient experience, thus become the foundation of this project.

However, the transition of academic research knowledge into practical design information often faces obstacles (Zielhuis et al., 2022a). Challenges include effectively teach-ing freshmen (Hoadley & Cox, 2008), selecting the right formats, and successfully conveying academic knowledge in a practical context (Stappers and Giaccardi, 2017). As a result, despite the fact that the primary research potentially enables healthcare designers to enhance the digital patient experience, whether practitioners can benefit from these academic findings is still unclear. Therefore, to further transfer the primary research to support design education and best practices for improving patient experience in digital health, as well as increase the accessibility and applicability of the primary research (Daniluk and Koert, 2015; Cook, D. A., 2007), an exploration starts.

Desk research and literature research are done to define the project’s scope and make a concrete goal. Design guidelines are considered since they play a crucial role in leading designers to success. Through learning and following effective design guidelines, designers can significantly enhance the quality of their design outcomes (Fu, Yang, & Wood, 2016). To transform the primary research into design guidelines, nine qualities should be considered in the creation and evaluation process. Additionally, the website is an appro-priate method of transferring information (Daniluk and Koert, 2015; Cook, D. A., 2007). When creating a website, usability, accessibility, and consistency need to be considered.

It is defined that the primary research should be transformed into design guidelines based on a website platform, the design goal therefore is defined as: To transform the primary research into a good and usable web-based design guide, enabling healthcare designers to utilize the primary research to improve the digital patient experience. To achieve this goal, design activities should be conducted to ensure the website’s usability, consistency, and accessibility, with the guide content’s clarity, efficacy, and credibility.
Through design activities such as walkthroughs and case studies, an initial minimum viable (MVP) website is developed. An evaluation workshop makes clear that the website partially meets
its design objectives and suggests a need for improvement in content clarity and efficacy and website usability. Following this feedback, an iteration is developed, resulting in a complete website design. A small-scale usability test validates the in-crease in content clarity, credibility, and efficacy, with overall usability slightly declining. Hence, the website is iterated again.
In conclusion, there was proof that the final design met the goal of having expected clarity, efficacy, credibility, color accessibility, and internal and external consistency. The final SUS score was 59.5 out of 100, which was acceptable but implied room for improvement (Bangor, Kortum, & Miller, 2009).