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.
Archive for the ‘Design Strategy’ Category
Where business analysis and user experience intersect: the benefits of collaboration
Monday, July 12th, 2010Insights on Designing Better Healthcare Solutions
Monday, May 17th, 2010What 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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Does Your Website Really Need a Mobile App?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Word 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. (more…)
Nine Essential Characteristics of Good UX Designers
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009Someone sent a message to the Adaptive Path Alums mailing list last fall asserting that Information Architects (IAs) need to be really great coders to do their jobs. I was aghast. I uttered many things, loudly, that are inappropriate for a professional blog. The clincher for me was this line, “[IAs] need to wake up in the middle of the night and code SQL joins.” No. No, we don’t. I collected myself and wrote a response just snarky enough for me to feel I’d made my point. This discussion went back and forth for a bit, but it ended up somewhere interesting. To make my ultimate point, I thought hard about it and defined the nine essential characteristics you must possess to make a good software user experience designer.
User Centered Design Process for Healthcare Systems
Friday, June 26th, 2009When I was putting together a presentation on User Experience and Healthcare for Refresh Portland, I stepped back to see if I do anything differently when designing products and applications for Healthcare clients than I do for clients in other industries. After looking at the emerging trends in the Healthcare industry and the shifting landscape of online user behavior, it became clear to me that when designing for Healthcare, I focus more user research and I prefer smaller, more iterative cycles within the design process.
The attached presentation details my insights on the subject and describes the steps I feel one should focus on when designing products and applications for Healthcare users.
A look at Healthcare Systems and Web 2.0
Friday, May 22nd, 2009Recently I attended the Health 2.0 conference and was impressed by the drive and the passion displayed by everyone to transform the Healthcare industry. This included entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, physicians, corporate and research organizations. The conference discussions highlighted the changing role of patients and physicians and showcased the different ways in which Web 2.0 tools had been used to help bring this change. It was a good platform to get a sneak preview into the future of the digital landscape of Healthcare and evaluate some of our strategies for getting there.
Falling in Love with Machines: A Case of Low Expectations
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009I have a long and intense history of falling in love with machines. As a User Experience Designer, I likely pay more attention to machines than most people, but what most people also don’t know is that I am paying attention to how they are engaging with their machines. What I’ve found is that there are three things that inspire people to fall in love with their machines, two of which make sense and the third blows my mind.