Archive for the ‘Design Strategy’ Category
Thursday, 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. (more…)
Tags: Interaction Design, Mobile, User Experience
Posted in Accessibility, Design Strategy, Interaction Design, Recent Posts, User Experience, User Research | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
If you have made presentations in the past, it is very likely that you have spent a fair amount of time thinking about ways to make it more engaging for your audience. I have grappled with this situation too. So when I saw a workshop on using storytelling in presentations, I registered for it. Here are a few things I learned.
The workshop provided practical tips to improve presentation content, delivery and brought forward two distinct styles for weaving stories into presentations. These styles emerged naturally during the impromptu presentations made by people in the audience and were not prescribed by our presentation coach Lynn Espinoza. Maybe that is why I found them to be more effective in communicating a message. Here are the two ways of using personal stories in your presentations to better engage the audience. (more…)
Tags: Emotion, Presentations, Social Media, Storytelling
Posted in Design Strategy, User Experience | 6 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Last week I published an article on Johnny Holland, an excellent online magazine about interaction design & research. I talk about how flaws in the iPhone’s user experience design illuminate the problems that user experience designers will be grappling with in the immediate future, and I provide some methods to explore in order to address these problems. So far, the article has generated a lot of discussion. People have reacted strongly against and strongly for some of the points I make in the article. Read it over lunch (it’s long) and throw in your two cents!
The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for UX Design
Tags: Future, Gestural User Interfaces, Mobile, Publication
Posted in Design Strategy, Healthcare, Interaction Design, Social Media, User Experience | No Comments »
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Someone 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.
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Posted in Design Strategy, User Experience | 30 Comments »
Friday, June 26th, 2009
When 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.
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Tags: Refresh Portland, User Research, Web 2.0
Posted in Design Strategy, Healthcare, Tools and Techniques, User Experience | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
I found myself asking this question when one of our clients mentioned that they wanted to integrate social media in their customer facing website. I had just finished analyzing the data from a recent survey done to uncover the unmet needs of the users. All data indicated that the users of the website were very skilled at getting their job done without having the need to engage with their peers. Which made me wonder why they would need social media. Digging deeper, I realized that 20% of the users had Facebook accounts but they had not used those accounts on a regular basis leave alone the option of using it for work. So while the client wanted to integrate social media to increase users’ engagement with the new site and stay ahead of the competition, I wondered if the users were ready for it. To get some answers I proposed doing what we love doing, talking to the users.
After doing a few telephone interviews with potential users, my gut reaction for introducing social media was positive. Here is why:
(more…)
Tags: Design Strategy, Social Media, User Research
Posted in Design Strategy, Social Media, User Experience, User Research | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
Recently 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.
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Tags: Conferences, Healthcare, User Experience, Web 2.0
Posted in Conferences, Design Strategy, Healthcare, Interaction Design, User Experience, User Research | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
I 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.
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Tags: Analytics, Emotion, Interaction Design
Posted in Design Strategy, Interaction Design | 1 Comment »
