Taking a look at other sectors, for example, the video game industry, can provide new and creative ideas for running an aesthetic clinic
Although it might sound like a strange idea to look to another industry for lessons and inspiration, it is something I have enjoyed doing over the years. It has shaped my healthcare career for the better by being able to bring a new perspective and has invariably led to a more innovative approach and a better outcome. Understanding the processes behind maintaining a printing operation for a large national newspaper led me to a better understanding of methods for tracking clinical equipment and rapid methods for enabling lay people to resolve common technical issues.
While at first it might seem easy to dismiss the video game industry as being for adolescents alone, it generated over US $120 billion in 2018 and is growing. To put that into perspective, the global film industry generated around US $136 billion in the same period and will likely be overtaken by the video game industry within the next 2 years (Ibis World, 2019). A modern blockbuster video game can cost up to US $250 million to develop, dwarfing most film budgets, employing several hundred staff and will typically generate income for the publisher for a decade or more.
To ensure their game is a success, they need to understand their customer's emotions and phycology and create a model of their product in their mind that they understand. They embrace the fact that they only have a vague idea of what the finished product looks like, and iteratively test their product until it becomes intuitive, fun and an immersive experience.
Understand your client's psychology
Creating your product in your client's mind is just as important as creating it physically, so understanding your client's psychology, interests and allegiances is essential. Unfortunately, there are many models of the human mind, such as Freud or Maslow's, which may or may not help, but understanding where your product lies on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can help shape how you develop and market it (Maslow, 1943) (Figure 1). Briefly, Maslow's model can be visualised as a pyramid, with each layer dependent on the layer below it:
- Self-actualisation: achieving one's full potential
- Esteem needs: prestige and feeling of accomplishment
- Belonging/love needs: intimate relationships and friends
- Safety needs: security and safety
- Physiological needs: food, water, warmth and rest.
Figure 1. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1943)
It is worth reflecting on this model and understanding why your potential clients might want your product, and what we should be implicitly promoting by understanding the hierarchy. Some may purchase your product for esteem reasons, and others to fit in with a perceived social group.
Creating a client persona
Your client's behaviour is determined by a mental model of how they perceive the world around them. They start by gathering vast quantities of data via their senses, sifting through it for patterns and creating schemas to represent nouns such as a cat or a dog, verbs such as playing with the dog, and adjectives such as happy. The model they have about aesthetics in general and the services you provide is very important and is likely to be quite different from your perception of your services. They will not use clinical language to verbalise that model (e.g. ventilator, renal support, infusion pumps etc = a life support machine), and their definition for success will be different to your clinical definition. It is important to be able help shape their mental model about aesthetics to both include the services (nouns) your clinic provides and attach positive adjectives to those nouns to help influence their behaviour in a positive manner.
Finally, as part of their identity, clients will have specific interests, such as jobs/hobbies, have specific allegiances to particular brands and will identify and engage with several communities, either online or physically. Hopefully, one of those communities will be your brand, and some of them may start to get more involved in it. Remember to look out for these individuals and find ways to recognise and promote their interest
Combined, the above traits combine to create a client persona, which is a fictional person you reference every time you consider designing new products or marketing campaigns for.
Scoping and iteration
While developing a game can take several years and has many hundreds of components, there are a few things we can learn from their methods.
From a project management perspective, projects can be broken down into milestones, and within that, specific features. They then assign a weight as to how desirable the feature is from a client/designer perspective and another weight as to how difficult it will be to deliver it from a practical perspective. From here, that matrix is used to determine what features to deliver over the next couple of weeks for that iteration (also known as a sprint), and to assess if the product is sufficiently developed to test it on their testers. Their objective is to get the product to a point where external testers can start to give real feedback.
They constantly perform risk mitigation exercises and keep iterating through the highest risks to mitigate them. Unchecked risks become more expensive to fix as the product is being built, so they do not shy away from them. Additionally, they prototype constantly. They will try small mock-ups of features both internally and on external testers.
A prototype that fails is not regarded as a failure but regarded as a monument to learning instead. It helps to form the direction of the product.
Testing, evaluating and adapting
They test, evaluate and adapt constantly during product development. They will put pairs of random in front of a computer then watch silently without interfering as they try the product, making notes of what they say, what difficulties they encounter and if they use the product as they expect. They take note of the demographics of the people that did/did not enjoy their product. While they listen to any solutions a client might have to a perceived problem, they focus on understanding the problem, not their solution. Afterwards, they compare notes with any other observers, and if they have made the same observations, they know what to attack in the next iteration. If they see emergent behaviour during testing that fits the core objective of the product, they will look into ways of encouraging that behaviour across all players. When they start the next iteration of testing, it will be with a completely different set of testers to see if the issues picked up by the previous testers are still present.
Conclusion
In the video game industry, product development is driven by a deep understanding of their clients and developing a mental character they can relate to. During product development, small prototypes are created, evaluated and used to map out how the development of the project should proceed within the overall vision of the project. They constantly test features and groups of features on external clients, rather waiting for a complete product, and constantly test with new testers.
These methods are markedly different to clinical trials or projects in controlled environments development methodologies we tend to see in the healthcare industry. However, when trying to create a new product line or marketing campaign for our clinic, perhaps it is time take a different approach of ‘game on’ instead?