Dialogue around issues and ideas that impact user experience
Written by: Sheetal Dube on August 20th, 2010
Personal Health Records, or PHRs, are health records that are initiated and maintained by a patient. Government incentives to promote adoption and “meaningful use” of EHRs (Electronic Health Records) by physicians has also raised the healthcare community’s interest in online PHRs such as Google Health and Microsoft Vault. A recent California Healthcare Foundation survey revealed that PHRs can empower some people to take better care of themselves, especially people with chronic conditions. However, the growth of PHR use remains low even for this high-potential segment.
Evantage believes that a key component of this issue is the involvement of caregivers in a patient’s PHR. To dig deeper, we are conducting primary research with patients and their caregivers. We want to learn how to improve the design of PHRs to incorporate the needs of patients who have caregivers. We want to learn whether a better designed PHR could empower patients and their caregivers to use it more and experience improved health outcomes as a result.
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Tags: EHRs, EMRs, Personal Health Records, PHRs
Posted in Healthcare, User Research | 3 Comments »
Written by: Fred Beecher on August 9th, 2010
Lately, I’ve been preaching about how it’s important for UX designers to understand the technology our designs will be implemented in. I’m going to try to put this gospel into practice by unpacking for you the hidden treasures that HTML5 offers UX designers. HTML5 is a big deal. Maybe the biggest deal in Web technology since JavaScript. (I’m still in denial about Flash.) HTML5 is going to make it easy for developers to make websites with desktop application interactivity, performance, and functionality, which is going to open up vast horizons of possibility for UX designers.
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Tags: Accessibility, HTML5, Technology
Posted in Interaction Design, Recent Posts, Tools and Techniques | 1 Comment »
Written by: Jeff Harrison on July 21st, 2010
How do you communicate danger to people who don’t speak your language? How do you not only alert them, but give them enough information to act even though you will never meet face-to-face? These questions were behind an effort to design a warning for the proposed nuclear waste storage facility inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, and they’re similar to the ones you face when trying to design for user security online.
In 2003, the Desert Space Foundation, a Nevada arts organization, hosted an exhibition that showcased novel ideas for a warning sign that would retain both its meaning and its structural integrity for the 10,000 years that Yucca Mountain was projected to pose a hazard. The difficulty of the task manifested itself in the variety of entries. Several artists assumed that familiar symbols like the yellow and black radiation icon would carry the scent of danger across the divide, but not everyone agreed, according to a Los Angeles Times article at the time.
The risk of radiation burns is lower for Internet users (especially with modern LCD monitors), but being online can be dangerous all the same. The recipients of the communication are separated not by time but by their lack of technical expertise. However, the complexity of the threat and the jargon used to describe it is at least as opaque to many people as ancient pictograms can be to us.
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Tags: Security, usability, User Experience
Posted in Interaction Design, Recent Posts, User Experience | 2 Comments »
Written by: Sheetal Dube on July 15th, 2010
In the recent past, I have been tasked with designing mobile applications for iPhone. Axure is the prototyping tool we use at Evantage and it has served me well in terms of creating prototypes for mobile applications and demonstrating them on a laptop. However, I have had trouble viewing the prototypes on an iPhone. The screen size shrinks on the iPhone making it difficult to read the content on the screen. In the near future we expect to use these prototypes to gather feedback from users and design applications for other devices (Android, Blackberry, iPad, etc). To ensure that we have the tools at Evantage to meet the demand, I spent some time looking at the workarounds with Axure and pros and cons of other mobile prototyping tools designed for the UX community.
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Tags: Axure, Mobile, Prototyping
Posted in Axure, Interaction Design, Tools and Techniques | 3 Comments »
Written by: Kelli Norland on July 12th, 2010
According to Harvard Business Review editor Julia Kirby, 2010 may be the year for a resurgence in companies reconnecting with their users and focusing on user experience, but don’t forget about business analysis! It’s the BA’s job to ensure that the issues and business objectives are understood. When the solution involves end users (of a new or enhanced application/website/product), that’s where we need team up with a user experience (UX) professional.
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Tags: Business Analysis, User Experience
Posted in Business Analyst, Design Strategy, Tools and Techniques | 1 Comment »
Written by: Lori Baker on July 6th, 2010
I used to consider failing as something to avoid at all costs. But occasionally something went wrong and I spent loads of time trying to figure out what I could do differently in the future. After years of beating myself up, I’ve come to appreciate failure. I learn something new and often it can open new avenues of creativity. This article includes a few ways to embrace failure. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Recent Posts | No Comments »
Written by: Mary Donnelly on June 16th, 2010
Besides using my iphone as a phone, I also use it to read emails, tweets, facebook status updates, yammer posts and TFLN (texts from last night). Most of the applications I use serve the same purpose—they provide content from various sources/ individuals, and they all have either an equivalent desktop application or websites. As I’ve become intimately familiar with these apps, I’ve begun to appreciate some of things that one or another does, and I’ve found it increasingly annoying that all of the apps aren’t following suit.
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Tags: Facebook, iPhone, Mobile, Social Media, twitter, User Experience
Posted in Recent Posts, Social Media, Tools and Techniques, User Experience | No Comments »
Written by: Fred Beecher on May 30th, 2010
At Evantage, interactive prototyping and iterative prototype testing are key components of our process. We typically work on complex, business critical systems that must serve a wide array of audiences. Iterative prototyping and testing are absolutely crucial to designing a pleasant, usable experience for systems like these. There are many factors that contribute to the effectiveness of prototype testing, but one of the biggest is content. I recently cooked up a tool to help designers articulate their needs and get that content from those who have it.
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Tags: content, Prototyping, scenarios, templates
Posted in Recent Posts, Tools and Techniques | 3 Comments »
Written by: Sheetal Dube on May 17th, 2010
What are the key trends in the healthcare industry? What implications do they have on the solutions I am designing? You might be familiar with these questions if you are a product planner, business analyst or designer. Lately, my projects have been focused in the healthcare space. Because of this, I have developed insights into the key trends and analyzed their implications for creating better design solutions. In this post, I’ll share those insights and provide tips on how to design around them. Hopefully you’ll find them helpful and share some of your tips too.
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Tags: Healthcare, mHealth, Mobile, Trends
Posted in Design Strategy, Healthcare, User Research | 2 Comments »
Written by: andrew on April 29th, 2010
My name is Andrew Janis, and you haven’t seen me in this space before because I’m usually wearing the marketing hat at Evantage. That often means I’m knee deep in marketing analytics and occasionally working with someone on our UX team to analyze usability test results in the context of real-world behavior.
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Tags: Analytics, User Experience, User Research
Posted in Analytics | 8 Comments »
Written by: Mary Donnelly on April 20th, 2010
I have been tasked with creating an Axure prototype that will be demonstrated on an iPad. I’ve seen the iPad, played with the iPad, but this is first time I will be creating a prototype to be displayed on the iPad.
The first question I had was, “How will I get the Axure prototype onto the iPad? Is there an app for that? “
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Tags: iPad, iPhone, User Experience
Posted in Axure, Product Reviews, Recent Posts, User Experience | 4 Comments »
Written by: Fred Beecher on March 11th, 2010
Are you going to SXSW? If you are then check out “The Right Way to Wireframe!” This is a two-part talk in which myself and three other user experience designers tackled the same business problem using different tools.
In the UX world, we don’t get to see each other’s work very much; this talk changes that. It shows how, no matter what tool you use, the important part is the thought process you go through to arrive at your solution. Here are the links to the two workshops:
The Right Way to Wireframe - Part 1
The Right Way to Wireframe - Part 2
Also, I’m running a little social & technological experiment… I’m sharing all the notes I take at SXSW with the whole world via Evernote. Of course I’ll take notes at panels, but the really interesting part of SXSW is the discussions on the side. Those’ll show up in my notes too. Here’s the URL if you want to follow along!
http://www.evernote.com/pub/fred_beecher/sxsw2010notes
The environment at SXSW is… well, I’ll be kind and say, “fluid.” If you want to see what I may or may not be attending, check out my schedule on Sitby.Us.
http://www.sitby.us/schedule/fred_beecher/
Tags: Presentations, SXSW
Posted in Axure, Conferences, Recent Posts, Tools and Techniques | No Comments »
Written by: Fred Beecher on February 22nd, 2010
In my last article, I talked about our career path for UX designers. Developing something like that for your organization, while a worthwhile task, is certainly not easy. Fortunately, there are range of things you can do yourself to move your career (and your paycheck!) upward! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: career development, education, management
Posted in UX Career | No Comments »
Written by: Fred Beecher on February 15th, 2010
User experience (UX) design has a reputation for being both hard to get into and hard to progress from. I talked about how to get into UX design in my last article, so now I want to talk about where you go once you get in. In some ways, this is actually a harder problem. There are books that introduce you to UX design but none that really show you how to branch out once you’ve established yourself as a UX designer. Fortunately, I work at Evantage, where in 2006 Mary Donnelly and I helped management and HR to define a comprehensive UX design career path. I’m going to share it with you here and then discuss some other options to consider in a follow-up article. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Career Path, Job Titles, User Experience
Posted in Recent Posts, Tools and Techniques, UX Career | 10 Comments »
Written by: Sheetal Dube on January 25th, 2010
2010 seems like a turning point for user experience professionals. The decade has seen success stories like Amazon and Zappos that have made businesses sit up and value the power of understanding customer needs. There has been a surge in people across generations using online media for everyday activities and some of the trends in social media, mobile applications and technology have opened new doors for user experience professionals. At Evantage we have started experiencing the impact of some of these trends.
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Tags: Augmented Reality, Consumer Insights, GPS Technology, Mobile, Social Media, Trends
Posted in Social Media, User Experience, User Research | 6 Comments »
Written by: Lori Baker on January 21st, 2010
Word on the street is that if you have a great site you should create a mobile app. I’ve been hearing it a lot from clients lately that everybody is on their phone and “if users could access our information then our product will be more valuable.” Is this just a fad or is it valid? Well, that depends on your customers and your business goals. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Interaction Design, Mobile, User Experience
Posted in Accessibility, Design Strategy, Interaction Design, Recent Posts, User Experience, User Research | 2 Comments »
Written by: Mary Donnelly on January 18th, 2010
It’s a new year. Time to start thinking about what conferences to attend in 2010. The following is a list of conferences we at Evantage are likely to attend (or have attended in the past) due to their content and location. This is not a comprehensive list. There are some conferences such as IDEA that I would recommend but they do not currently have information listed about a 2010 conference. Likewise, the Usability Professional Association annual conference is another one I would typically recommend, but due to its location in Munich, Germany this year, it doesn’t appear feasible (unless you have the travel budget). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Accessibility, Interaction Design, usability conferences, User Experience
Posted in Conferences | No Comments »
Written by: Lori Baker on December 4th, 2009

If you’re at a loss for what to get that special user experience designer in your life whether it’s because we’ve already bought it (“I need it to keep up on trends for work”) or you still aren’t quite sure what we do exactly, I’ve compiled a few ideas from the UX consultants at Evantage and my own Christmas list to help you out.
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Posted in Recent Posts | No Comments »
Written by: Fred Beecher on November 16th, 2009
In the past few months I’ve taken on two and-a-half mentees through the Information Architecture Institute’s mentorship program (two are local, one is remote… sorry Tyler, I know you’re a full person!). This has got me thinking even more than usual about how to get started in user experience (UX) design, so I’ve decided to save myself some time and write a post that collects all the resources and advice I usually give out on this topic. I hope this is useful for you, but if you feel like I’ve missed something there’s a comments box at the bottom. ; )
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Tags: Getting Started
Posted in Recent Posts, UX Career, User Experience | 9 Comments »