UX: Are You a Pattern-maker?

what it means to be agile? what the agile method feels liek? muddy, dirty, roll up your sleeves and forget about best practices. we used to call it code and fix. agile is very similar.

Is UX design still a skill that requires specialized knowledge or has it become a popular craft that practically anyone can engage in? If it is still a skill, has it become numbingly unoriginal–just the assemblage of patterns from a catalog?

  • Pattern-based thinking has become a standard approach resulting in more sameness in UI design. Familiarity has trumped innovation and simplicity (what users already know is easier for them to adopt)
  • Mobile has spurred an increased integration of OS elements, functions and patterns into design. This is radically different from browser-based application development that was much more of a one-off
  • New template-based software like Balsamic enables team-members with no training to develop pretty clear-looking wireframes in half the time that it takes using Omnigraffle or Illustrator
  • The vulgarized version of Agile method means that everyone is involved in the UX design process, regardless of their expertise. This is not necessarily bad, but can result in irrational design decisions

What this means for the UX design profession will be the subject of my next installment.

Published on September 6, 2011 10:22 pm.
Filed under: Design, Technology, UX Tags: , , , , , , ,

Beware the Yestocracy

There’s an enormous amount of uncertainty in the air. The volatility in the stock market, unemployment and under-employment, and signs of instability in governments abroad and locally add credibility to the impression that things are barely hanging on and might collapse at any moment.

For those of us fortunate to be running businesses it’s important to recognize this ambient feeling and understand how it is changing the marketplace and altering the outcome of our decisions. Uncertainty makes us question our judgment, second guess our decisions and undermine our top talent by questioning their decisions and micromanaging them.

For those of us working for companies, there’s the fear of losing our jobs; either through a downturn in business or because of downward pressure on salaries. The result is making it more contingent for us to prove our worth every day or risk being replaced.

All this impacts the dynamics of the workplace. It makes employees afraid to speak up with dissenting opinions and makes employers more desperate to “get it right.” Taken together this is a recipe for groupthink and the formation of a “Yestocracy,” a social construction where employees are more concerned with keeping their managers and employers happy and less concerned with doing what’s best for the business. Like the name implies, the employers are roughhousing their employees with the threat of dismissal and the employees are saying whatever they need to say to keep their employers happy. Yes, yes, yes… Even when they know the correct answer is no.

Published on September 2, 2011 12:16 am.
Filed under: Truths, UX

Pharma: Head in the Clouds

Thinking today about cloud computing and how the successful marketing of the concept has impacted my clients’ beliefs and expectations.

Software as a service and cloud computing is on everyone’s lips but it is surprising how much confusion there is about what it is. This is surprising considering how much good information is available on the topic. Perhaps it’s part of the downside of the successful marketing campaign around the cloud: non-technical clients seem to think it’s something new despite the fact that its been around for a long time.

Meanwhile in the healthcare industry, cloud computing represents a major challenge to the existing infrastructure that’s used to house and manage patient data. Pharma has gone to great lengths to ensure security, hygiene and compliance around this sort of personally identifiable information and it will take more than a marketing campaign to change existing relationships between database vendors and IT departments.

From a design and production perspective the implications of cloud computing are huge: especially for those of us involved in one-to-one marketing and dynamic health applications. Whether we design our applications for a web services/cloud model or for a traditional model will significantly impact design. Today that means applications that require data storage such as tracking tools and health diaries that will benefit from seamless access to data across disconnected wireless devices.

Published on August 30, 2011 9:49 pm.
Filed under: Design, Healthcare, Mobile, Technology, UX

Protecting Privacy on Remote Health Applications

Mobile app dev is setting a general UX standard for mobile security but we need a protocol for health apps

In the world of mobile app design it is the operating systems that are setting the user expectations for mobile security. This is because the OS are so closely tied to the design and by extension to the user experience. This could be just fine for most applications but we probably need a more specific protocol for health applications that store or transmit personal health related data.

For example, should these apps have a timeout due to inactivity? Many users do not leverage the built-in automatic logout that comes with the OS. If so, what is the trigger to log a user off? Is it a time delimited period of inactivity? If so, what’s the correct duration for an automatic timeout on a healthcare application?

Banking websites log us out after 5 minutes of inactivity. The same is true for most web-based applications that handle financial transactions such as those found on credit card and investment management websites.

When it comes to health applications HIPAA rules are generally applied (even for those sites that are not associated with insurance). And, of course, each client organization has its own internal privacy guidelines that need to be adhered to.

But remote, portable and embedded applications change the equation for this significantly. For example, how will symptom monitoring devices or related mobile applications manage security in a wireless world? Especially challenging when the application is always on or nearly always on.

One option will be to replicate the log-out due to inactivity model that has been adopted in the web space.But the implications of this need to be examined against the need to confirm trigger-based functions, such as alerts. What may be required is that blinded notifications display to the user for their confirmation without revealing any sensitive information.

Like shared public computers, mobile and embedded devices also present risks for unauthorized use and unintentional sharing of sensitive data.

Published on August 26, 2011 6:11 pm.
Filed under: Design, Healthcare, Technology, UX

New in Pharma

waiting as envisioned in this production of waiting for godot...

According to FDA regs, you can only describe a product as “new” for six months following approval. Good and clear enough but what about educational and user-created content published online? We’ve come to expect new articles to mean new, as in the last 24 hours–max. But with pharmaceutical companies requiring regulatory approval of all published materials, new can take on an entirely different meaning.

Now that the age of product websites (i.e., brand.com) are on the wane in favor of less brand-centric, more credible endeavors, we’re seeing more and more sites aspiring to community and blog status. But wait! Despite the design conventions, the site content still needs to move through regulatory approval at a snail’s pace.

It’s no secret that design conventions set expectation and when those expectations aren’t met it can send the user experience down the tubes. Take this scenario: pharmaceutical company wants to build an online community site to support a widely dispersed rare disease community. The site looks and feels like a community site with chronological postings and a blog look-alike. But all the postings are months old and premeditated. When site visitors attempt to make postings on their own they shoot their text into a three to six month oblivion with no knowledge if it will ever get posted or not. Not the best user experience.

What this really calls for is a two-tiered system for regulatory review: one for branded promotional content and the other for legitimate non-commercial speech in the hosted sphere.

Published on August 26, 2011 1:01 am.
Filed under: Design, Healthcare, Truths, UX

Design Challenges with Agile Prototyping

I love these mobile app stencils not only because they work so well but also because they remind me of the stencil kits we used in shop class eons ago

In the rush to release mobile apps and the proven success of rapid prototyping its no surprise that design has had to adjust to an agile methodology. This also means that the project sponsors are far more involved in design decisions than ever before.  It is in the nature of mobile design to rely on the OS far more than in browser-based application design. This implies (and demands) full integration of interaction design with software development in a way that hasn’t really been popular since before the emergence of the web.

Not a bad thing if you ask me.

Published on August 24, 2011 10:07 pm.
Filed under: Design, Mobile, Technology, UX

Attacking UX/IA for Large Organizations

I don't know what the purpose of diagrmas like this are, except that this is a big pile of confusing crap and I feel compelled to document that fact.

Trying to clean-up sprawling, industrial-sized websites is always a challenge but it gets more difficult in direct proportion to the size of the company that owns the site.

The most predictable issues revolve around distributed ownership, inconsistent naming conventions and lack of a holistic understanding of the end users. Perhaps the biggest challenge isn’t related to UX/IA at all but instead has to do with getting access to the stakeholders who are empowered to authorize change. Too often in engagements like these, good ideas get nixed because someone more senior isn’t engaged in the process.

Some key elements in the UX / IA toolkit include taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, comprehensive navigation analysis and content audits. But perhaps the most powerful thing to do is a straightforward end-user analysis, complete with profiles and scenarios. A lot of designers have moved away from this approach int eh last couple of years influenced by agile methods and the demands of rapid functional prototyping. But when working on a larger project I still feel that they’re critical. And this in never more true than when working ona corporate project. This is because, despite all the doctrine to the contrary, most organizations are still reproducing their internal organizational structure in their website navigation.

This is understandable given the way that many of the larger corporate CMS systems are designed and implemented. They are built around a traditional model of corporate hierarchy and organization. Further, they are most often rolled-out and managed on a functional basis.

Published on August 23, 2011 9:13 pm.
Filed under: Design, Healthcare, Technology, Truths, UX

Segmentation: Artifact of an Offset World?

When relationship marketing began print and broadcast media were the primary channels of communication. Television and radio provided only crude targeting. In print, presses could do split runs with different variations for different segments of the market. But, like broadcast television, these capabilities were crude by comparison with what we can do using information systems and social media to micro-target individuals.

Its no secret that extremely precise targeting can be accomplished today. SO much so that the chief concern is around the privacy issues around collecting personal information and selling it for the purpose of marketing.

Why then do marketers persist in thinking in market segments? Is this an artifact of the past that people won’t let go of or is it a convenient shorthand for making sense of the marketplace?

Published on August 22, 2011 2:14 pm.
Filed under: Healthcare, Truths, UX

Using PhoneGap to Deliver Mobile

Phone gap looks promising and today its free as a bird. What happens int he next year or two is still open. Perhaps it will be a new hybrid combination of marketing and technology platform. This is truly innovative.

J, one of our lead developers sprung on me that he’d used some downtime to prototype a “Build Once / Run Anywhere” mobile version using PhoneGap. After developing an iPhone app using an offshore development group (at no small expense) it’s nice to know we can leverage the investment across platforms (including blackberry) and tablets without having to fuss with multiple style sheets.

What’s odd is that if you use HTML to generate the UI you can end up with Android users looking at interfaces that look totally iPhone. (The opposite is just as possible, it only depends on where you start.)

But the real advantage is that updates are automatic and passive. this means that users don’t need to manually update their apps. All the while the app cam be tethered to a real remote SQL database in real time.

What’s really very innovate here is that Phone Gap aims to provide both a technology and marketing platform in one package thereby combining two domains of knowledge and organizational interests that have traditionally been worlds apart.

Published on August 17, 2011 1:44 am.
Filed under: Design, Healthcare, Technology, UX Tags: ,

The Importance of Concept Anchoring in App Design

THe concept of the Haida Rattle is non-verbal and assumed by tribal ritual participants. In traditional societies religion, spirituality and ritual are assumed and not chosen, unlike the function of religion in contemporary Western societies. Concept anchoring is required in our modern technological societies to help users overcome the challenges of mastering new conventions.

Designing software for smart phones and tablets requires a different approach than web application design. Unlike applications delivered via web, app users must understand how to use the application immediately or they will likely remove it from their device.

Consider the process that a typical user goes through in purchasing and buying an app. The purchase cycle may begin when the prospective buyer reads a review, gets  a personal recommendation or conducts a search in the app store on their phone. If the product looks appealing and the price is justifiable, the user will typically download and launch the application immediately.

I cannot think of many environments that are more distracting than a phone: For one thing, there’s a load of other applications, text, email and voice ready to interrupt the user flow; secondly, there’s a good chance the user is multitasking–the user may in fact just be waiting for a taxi, a plane or for friends to arrive for dinner. So first impressions are more then important; they are live or die episodes for your app. If you lose them on the initial crank, you may never get them back.

You may not be able to control the environment that your first-time user is going to be in when they experience your app for the first time, but you can take steps to make the experience positive.

Concept Anchor

A concept anchor is some aspect of your software that functions as key conceptual access for users to hold onto while they explore the functionality of your app. Without the anchor, the user can easily and quickly get lost and frustrated. When you’re app does something most people are already familiar with establishing a concept anchor is a no-brainer, but it gets much more tricky once you go into uncharted or ambiguous territory.

You establish a concept anchor in the design phase by identifying the key object, activity or task that is the prime rationale for developing your software. It should ideally be something that is already familiar to your users. For example, Instagram’s anchor is photographs–not the filters that makes the application unique. Similarly, Evernote uses the list as its concept anchor, even though there’s a million other ways to create lists, because it is the list, not the interesting things that evernote allows you to do with your list, that  people will initially and intuitively understand.

Surprise and Delight

Establish your concept anchor on the initial screen. This will have the dual benefit of making users feel comfortable while providing them with a secure anchor for them to hold on to while they explore the new and unique features your app has to offer. With the security of a concept anchor, new features can surprise and delight your new user. WIthout an anchor they may feel untethered, confused and frustrated.

Published on August 15, 2011 7:38 pm.
Filed under: Design, UX