Testing Positive for Healthcare UX

Added on 2 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
Experience design for employees, customers, users, and (now) patients.

“The healthcare experience is improving even though we’ve almost all had a less-than-pleasant memory of either waiting endlessly for an appointment, forgetting when and what dose of meds to take, crying over massive and unpredictable bills, or even just locating decent care in the first place. All of these mounting complaints and expenses have finally pushed healthcare to the tipping point. As a result, a patient-centered paradigm has emerged that is forcing organizations to more closely examine and improve the experiences they provide.”

(Maren Connary a.k.a. @MarenConnary ~ UX Week 2012 videos)

Mobile Input Methods

Added on 2 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
Input, output and the magic in-between.

“One key area that surprises a lot of designers and developers that I have worked with is input methods. Yes, they know that users don’t have a mouse, but there’s still an unstated assumption that all desktop Web input widgets will work. Perhaps more troubling is that their personal preferences and rumors sometimes supplant data regarding the kinds of actual experiences that exist out in the world.”

(Steven Hoober a.k.a. @shoobe01 ~ UXmatters)

“Product designers” and design team evolution

Added on 1 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
The new ‘homo universalis’ of experience design.

“Product designers often work alone, and because they’re expected to do so many things, end up working on projects of limited scope. (I think this contributes to the problem of managing complex user experiences). My supposition is that the small team of generalists can also out-produce an equal number of team-of-one product designers. You get higher quality, because folks who have a functional emphasis (such as visual design or interaction design) can deliver better than those whose priority is developing a broader set of tools. And you get greater output, because their mastery of those areas means they can deliver more quickly. What you give up are the transaction/overhead costs of teamwork, but I don’t think those are as great as the gains.”

(Peter Merholz a.k.a. @peterme)

Philips Design: From data to meaning for people

Added on 1 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
Sounds a lot like ‘Design for Understanding’, but I guess that’s not what they mean. Or maybe they do in part 2/2.

“The internet is becoming ever more intertwined with our daily lives, even more so now that mobile platforms are blurring the dividing line between the online and physical worlds. Data now touches so many parts of our lives that our world is becoming a composite of digital and real. Data is pervasive, abundant and constantly changing how the world operates. Tapping into this wealth of Big Data has huge potential for data-enhanced businesses that are creative and capable of making data meaningful and relevant for people.”

(YouTube Part 2/2)

Orchestrated Content: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach

Added on 31 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Next up: content choreography.

“In recent months, colleagues and I at Razorfish have been interested in a somewhat related effort to situate the practice and define how it gets things done. We have been looking at the discipline from a broader viewpoint, from the perspective of how content strategy abuts, intersects with, and influences other disciplines. We have proposed an approach to content that we call ‘Orchestrated Content’. Rather than focus on how content strategists work within their own discipline, phase by phase through the duration of a project, we look at how our practice is deeply interwoven with many other practices and plot out how content strategy functions across disciplines. We embrace the inevitably porous nature of the practice and highlight its role in tying together the larger strategy of transforming businesses.”

(Michael Barnwell ~ Scatter/Gather Razorfish)

The Experience is the Product

Added on 31 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Product, service, platform, ecosystem, and experience. All the way.

“(…) Service Design is about creating meaningful experiences and meaningful interactions – for and with the customers. It’s not about the products itself anymore (their features can easily be replicated) it’s about differentiating products by creating new ideas and emotional interconnections.”

(Pedro Custódio a.k.a. @pedrocustodio ~ NEXT Berlin)

Service design and economic crisis

Added on 31 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
My 10cc: “Crisis, what crisis?”.

“Service design is human-centered and this has led to users actively taking part in the design process co-creating the service. This co-creation is one of the most important reasons why service design can have such a big impact on mobilization of citizens. Including the citizens in the creation or improvement of a service or process that aims at improving their everyday experiences helps, in addition to creating a better experience for them, remove users’ hesitations or inhibitions regarding adopting the service.”

(Nelly Trakidou a.k.a. @NellyTrakidou)

Substituting Information for Interaction: A Framework for Personalization in Service Encounters and Service Systems (.pdf)

Added on 30 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Some new in-depth Glushko thinking.

“The service design literature contrasts information-intensive and experience-intensive domains and applications and makes proposals for different design methods that are most appropriate for each. This distinction seems sensible and useful when we contrast financial accounting with visits to Disneyland, but it begs some crucial design decisions for services nearer the middle of what is probably better viewed as a continuous design space. So instead of design principles or methods that assume a clear distinction, we propose to frame design decisions in ways that highlight the range of choices on the continuum between information-intensive and experience-intensive variations of a service system. We propose “substituting information for interaction” as this unifying concept in service system design. Interesting design choices arise in contexts where information accumulates through customer interactions and value can be created if the service provider can capture, analyze, and retrieve information about those interactions and the explicit or implied preferences in them. Here the degree to which the service provider can substitute information for interaction depends on the richness of the provider’s customer model to predict his next interaction or information need.”

(Robert J. Glushko and Karen Nomorosa)

Behavior Design Bootcamp with Stanford’s Dr. BJ Fogg

Added on 29 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Buzzword galore.

“(…) it makes sense now to call attention to the distinction between Dr. Fogg’s Behavior Theory – the emerging discipline of behavior design – and the widening concept of design thinking. In my mind, both occupy some similar space but are not mutually exclusive or competing thought architectures. BJ and I briefly discussed how design thinking and behavior design relate to one another, and he admittedly has not arrived at a definitive relationship, though he believes they are complimentary. I’m hopeful Dr. Fogg is willing to have an ongoing conversation with me about their relationship, and work with the design community to develop a framework in which behavior design and design thinking can be successfully leveraged together. Held in comparison, behavior design fits quite nicely into the larger Design Thinking or Human Centered Design process, and can be employed with great effect as part of a design thinker’s arsenal.”

(Ryan Wynia a.k.a. @ryanwynia ~ Technori)

User Experience is Not Just Design, It’s the Key to Innovation and Growth

Added on 26 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
It’s Garrett, not Garret.

“It’s not every day you have Jesse James Garrett stop by to talk about the state of user experience and its role in the future of business. But, we were fortunate to have him visit the set of Revolution to talk about the importance of people and experiences and how UX deserves the attention of the c-suite.”

(Brain Solis)

Ditch Traditional Wireframes

Added on 25 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Some still think they have value.

“Wireframes have played an increasingly leading role in the modern Web development process. They provide a simple way of validating user interface and layout and are cheaper and faster to produce than a final visual comp. However, most of the methods and techniques used to create them are far from being efficient, contradicting the principles and values that made wireframing useful in first place. While this article is not about getting rid of the wireframing process itself, now is a good time for questioning and improving some of the materials and deliverables that have become de facto standards in the UX field. To make this point clear, let’s do a quick review of the types of wireframes commonly used.”

(Sergio Nouvel a.k.a. @shesho ~ UX magazine)

Breaking Design Principles on Purpose

Added on 24 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Rules and exceptions.

“Rules. They keep our designs clean, consistent, aligned, and focused. The core principles upon which good design is built are absolutely essential to the education of any designer. The great thing about design rules though is that they can and should be broken, granted that you know what you’re doing. Read on to see some examples of effectively breaking design principles in order to improve a project.”

(Jason Gross a.k.a. @JasonAGross ~ Design Shack)

The Diagram of Information Visualization

Added on 23 October 2012 Peter Bogaards
Even business graphics is on the horizon. And that’s not clipart in PPTs.

“In the last ten years, the area of Information Visualization has witnessed an exponential increase in its popularity. Diagrammatic reasoning and visual epistemology are becoming readily accepted methods of research in many academic domains. Concurrently, information graphics and Infovis have grabbed the attention of a larger mainstream audience.”

(Parsons Journal for Information Mapping Volume IV, Issue 4)