paper & pencil

Lessons from the Medical Field

In the past year and a half of working for a company in the healthcare field, I've been reading more medical related articles. The CTO recently shared a couple of articles that offer great lessons for interaction designers.

Patients Lie, by Davis Liu, MD demonstrates what people say rarely matches with the real problem. Clients, whether internal or external, tend to present what they think should be the solution. It is our duty to listen and ask questions to get at the root cause... the real problem they need to solve. 

18 Stethoscopes, 1 Heart Murmur and Many Missed Connections by Madeline Drexler is a lesson in empathy and communication. Interaction designers need to find ways to connect and empathize with the people using their solutions. If you're fortunate to have constanct access to the your end users, designers need to gain the trust of the users and minimize the "patients lie" syndrome.

Essentially, as is the case with many professional fields, interaction designers operate in a customer service role. While mad Photoshop and CSS skills are highly touted, not enough emphasis is placed on the listening, communication and service skills that are critical to being a better designer. The best prototype in the world won't matter if the solution is misguided. 

Thoughts on UX & Agile Integration

Came across Integrated Usability in Agile teams from the trenches via the Agile Experience Design group on Linked In and it contains some great tips for UX folk working in Agile teams for the first time.

I've been working in an Agile-ish shop for just about a year and I love it, having been seeking out opportunites to do so for a couple years prior to that. To me, the tenets of Agile made perfect sense to me as change is inevitable and Agile is about embracing and dealing with change rather than fighting against it. 

To add to Robin Dymond's list, here are some additional items that have helped me be Agile in my IxD work:

• I've found being both the Product Owner and the IxD on projects helps me organize my IxD work as I have deep knowledge of what is most important to my customers and ensures I'm working from business priorities.
• Also, it helps to have quick & easy access to all the people I service - business stakeholders, customers, and the development team. One of many reasons I have always preferred working for smaller companies.
  
  
• Having breathing room between major development projects to take care of incremental improvements to existing applications allows me to increase my understanding of the business needs and the needs of the people using the software. This knowledge then feeds into the major development projects. During the gap between major projects I can also take time to develop conceptual models and high level interaction models so that I'm not as rushed when sprint 0 of a project hits. 
  
  
• Using software (VersionOne) to organize the enormous backlog of requests across numerous software applications.
  
  
• Lastly, working with a CTO that evangelizes both Agile and UX and has mentored me on taking a more systems engineering approach to my IxD work has been a very large part of the success I've had with Agile.

UI Humor

I love humor in software interfaces and even companies like Google who have a ginormous user base still find ways to have a little fun. I accidentally clicked on Task Manager in Chrome — it's right below Extensions, which is what I meant to click on — and I see a link called "Stats for nerds". Love it!

I Do Details

Excellent example of the importance of interaction design skills in software design, detailed by Basil Safwat How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail. The Apple team once again demonstrates the thoughtfulness they put into their software that comes from attention to detail and understanding of how people use software in various contexts. 

This example helps underscore the need to have someone on your team who's main priority is to focus on these small details. It results in the difference between an irritating experience over and over and one that is so great you don't even notice it.

Only 2 posts so far at The Invisible... I eagerly await more.

Hipmunk

I'm checking out Mashable's nominees for the best new user experiences in 2010 and I love the search results interface for Hipmunk.com. The search screen is minimal and easy to use, although it took a second or two to realize the calendars below were linked to the "depart" and "return" fields. I'm used to pop-up calendars on focus but I like this approach better. My favorite is the results screen, which is sorted by default by "agony". Hipmunk defines "agony" as "a combination of price, duration, and number of stops".

Being a UX Designer in an Agile World

Excellent presentation by Dmitry Nekrasovski on Surviving and thriving as a UX professional in an Agile development organization. Loved the tips on being a facilitator and a keeper and communicator of the big vision. One area that is tough for UX designers is being lightweight. It is challenging to design just enough for the next sprint while attempting to maintain a coherent vision. But with Agile, it's all about inspect and adapt and that includes the design.

View more presentations from Dmitry Nekrasovski.

Creating Positive User Experiences

Tech Talk at Google I/0 2010 on principles of positive user experiences by John Zeratsky of YouTube and Matt Shobe of Google. Full of tips and examples. The principles:

1. Be fast
2. Be yourself
3. Engage in conversations
4. Be willing to give up control
5. Be polite
6. Prepare for failure
7. Be reliable

Designing Seductive Business Apps

Podcast excerpt, about 16 minutes, from Stephen Anderson's talk on Designing Seductive Business Apps from the UIE Web App Masters tour. In the excerpt, Anderson describes the interaction design concepts of scarcity, set completion and feedback loops. There are lots of great examples of each concept. UIE also offers the portion of the slides so you can see the examples.

via www.uie.com

The Marshmallow Challenge

Tom Wujec demonstrates the power of prototyping through the Marshmallow Challenge. Kindergartners fared better than recent business school graduates... which is funny & scary.

Simplicity sells

David Pogue, technology columnist at the New York Times, explains how simplicity sells and pokes fun at some of the terrible software interfaces out there. He asks software creators to take time "sweat the details" for the end user. Very entertaining talk with 3 fun songs sprinkled throughout.

via www.ted.com