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Slanty (and underhanded) Design
I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed.
Going with the Flow: Interaction Design for Healthcare
Healthcare is a target-rich environment for design. Discussing even the smallest design challenge quickly exposes the hacked-together systems and processes that somehow function to help us stay healthy. Designers must understand the context in which they work, yet confronting the complexity of healthcare can be paralyzing. It seems impossible, for example, to discuss the viability of mobile devices at the point of care without discussing the Byzantine network of roles, regulations, and workflows that the device touches: nurse assistants, the lab, the patient, receptionists, regulatory bodies, HIPAA, hospital and lab information systems, IT departments, point-of-care coordinators, ADT systems, and so on.
While it’s important to understand the knotty context of a healthcare design problem, it’s just as important to know when to reach for the sword of methodology to cut through it. To illustrate this point, I’ll discuss some healthcare design challenges I’ve seen during my research and design work and the methods I’ve used to tame the complexity.
Do U SMS? Text Messaging is Not the Hassle it Once Was
Few modes of communication burden the user with as much interaction hassle as text messaging on mobile phones. Without help from word-prediction assistants, the word "Hello" requires 13 button-presses, not including an additional 5 to get from the start screen to the messaging app. Nevertheless, the clear benefits of short text message services (SMS) have lured untold millions into uncomfortable, not to say unsatisfying, partnerships with their mobile phones.
Notable Product: How Nokia´s 8290 Does Something Right
Most people buy mobile phones because they want to be able to make phone calls anywhere, anytime. All the other stuff that's crammed into phones—calculators, game players, text-messaging capability—represents incomplete solutions for problems that are better served by devices dedicated to those needs. If I want to play a game on the go, I won't buy a Nokia 8290.
Still, phones offer a lot of sophisticated functionality to support specific mobile phone needs. Users need a way to quickly change ring-tones, ring volume, and message alert tones—so phone manufacturers allow you to tweak these so that one's phone can behave appropriately as one moves from the construction site to the movie theater.
Interface Design as a Life or Death Proposition
In the mid-1980's, a team of physicians, lawyers, and public health experts conducted a lengthy study of the nature and causes of medical errors. They published their findings, entitled "Incidence of adverse events and negligence in hospitalized patients," in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991.[1] Their research indicated that "there is a substantial amount of injury to patients from medical management, and many injuries are the result of substandard care." While the industry evaluations and renovations sparked by these findings have taken effect, physicians and clinicians have simultaneously adopted more sophisticated technologies to provide more accurate and efficient care. [2]
In Telematics, No Technology is a Panacea
The buzz in the telematics industry lately is centered around why it's not living up to expectations. Ford and Qualcomm recently ended their multi-million dollar telematics joint venture called Wingcast, which was one of the major players in the industry. Two years ago, projections for the telematics market in 2010 were in the $40 billion range; newer studies now put that amount closer to $20 billion. Telematics suppliers are cutting staff, and automotive manufacturers are scaling back telematics initiatives. So what's the problem?
Learning From the Mistakes of Internet Banks
Retail banks are realizing that Internet banking is not living up to the hype that surrounded it a few years ago. At that time, analysts predicted that demand would follow the trends in general Internet usage and grow to hundreds of millions of users by the middle of this decade. Some brave entrepreneurs were even betting that the age of the branch-based deposit institution was over, and that upstart "Internet-only" banks would be able to capitalize on hot new technology to steal all the customers. Yet adoption rates are low, and customer interest is flagging. Why? Online banking is a good example of how bricks-and-mortar institutions can stumble when they try to solve new economy problems with old world approaches.
Goal-Directed Content Management
A year ago, most software industry analysts were predicting that Content Management (CM) was going to be the hot sector this year. Unfortunately, sales for most CM software providers are not meeting expectations, and even CM insiders are suggesting that the cause could be a growing disappointment with CM implementation results. Anecdotal evidence from within the CM industry indicates that CM implementations fail to meet corporate expectations about half of the time.
Part of the reason for missed expectations could be poor usability. Forrester Research recently released a research paper on the subject: "Packaged Apps Fail The Usability Test." In it, they don't name the vendors, but they rate the usability of two popular CM systems. Both rated very poorly. Forrester's conclusion is that much better design is needed to win user adoption and higher rates of corporate satisfaction.
Content Management Systems: Don´t automate the Misery
Organizations of every size are attempting to get a handle on their content generation, management, and publishing systems. This trend toward business process re-engineering (BPR) of content management is largely the result of an outsized proliferation of Web pages, intranet sites, and electronic communications strategies adopted by organizations, their partners, and customers.
Sadly, few organizations have seen much good come of content-management BPR initiatives so far. Of the many reasons for these failures, one stands out: these BPR initiatives—and the systems they spawn—are focused on realizing organizational objectives without sufficient regard for the context, habits, and goals of the people who will actually use the system. These new technology solutions are intended to create efficiencies, but they actually prevent people from achieving their objectives, which generally have to do with reducing hassle and ensuring their own personal effectiveness.
Beating the Checkout Blues
Your online store is a good example of the breed. You've got good products at good prices, the site navigation is straightforward, the product information is rich, appropriate, and easy to find, and everyone likes the clean, uncluttered visual design of the site. So why do more than half of your customers abandon their full shopping carts?
Depending on which research report you read, roughly 25% to 75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before consummating the deal. Despite the disparity in numbers, all the research firms agree on one thing: that's way too many.
The Second-Order Effects of Wireless
Even though "wireless" is the hot buzzword on the lips of every high-technologist, the effects of the technology hold far more interest than does the technology itself.
Wireless freedom is intriguing: It isn't hard to imagine a world of perpetually perambulating people with cell phones clamped to their ears and styli firmly gripped in their fingers doing at the cinema or the next table over at Il Fornaio what they could formerly do only at their desks.
But this flexibility to work where you want is just the first order of change wrought by these new tools. Far more interesting are the second-order effects - those unintended consequences of a new technology which often have a more powerful impact on society than the more obvious first-order changes.
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