OneNote is, as you've seen in the prior posts (OneNote for Interaction Designers and OneNote for Interaction Designers: the Nuts and Bolts, awesome for design meetings. But it's also useful in research and client presentations, too.

How we use it in research

[From the video, slightly edited:] Having a laptop open in a research interview puts a barrier between you and the person you're interviewing, and the typing can be quite distracting and intimidating for the interviewee. But typed notes are searchable, making for very useful reference when you’re synthesizing your notes. OneNote is a nice compromise. With a Tablet in slate mode, we remove the physical barrier of the laptop, and as long as you have the pen in a “Create Handwriting” mode, you can later go back and search your notes as if they were typed. (The handwriting recognition is pretty amazing.)
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After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama's reelection campaign, we asked Scout Addis, a former Cooperista, now the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss his experience working on the campaign. Scout sat down with Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine to tell us what he learned and to discuss how design and technology worked together to help win the election and change the future of politics.

Doug LeMoine : I'll start with a design cliché, but it really applies here. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." Technology has really changed the way that people get information, form opinions, share those opinions, and so on. This seems like it has a special bearing on the nitty-gritty of a campaign, which is all about getting people involved, promoting a point of view, changing minds. So let's start with this: How did Obama for America use technology to win?

Scout Addis: Campaigns have traditionally relied on paper, phones, and volunteers to contact voters. Even in 2012 we still printed out a list of names, and then handed that to a person to make calls or knock on doors. They then recorded their notes on paper, and handed it off to someone else to do data entry to get that information back into our analytics systems. That is how phone banking and canvassing is still done.

But all of that’s changing. For example, the Call Tool allowed anyone to volunteer for a phonebank anywhere they had an internet connection. Someone would go to call.barackobama.com, and it would provide them with a script and a number to call. They would call that person, follow the script, and enter the results of the call on the same web page. That information would then be fed into our database and the results of those calls added to what we already knew about that voter. Once we knew what was going on with that voter, we could better determine where to make our next calls.

On election day alone one million calls were made using the Call Tool. That’s a lot of paper and data entry time that we eliminated, and our records were always up-to-date in real-time.

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Cooper is honored and delighted to receive the award for “Best in Category, Optimizing”. We are proud to be in the company of some of the most creative and innovative designers and grateful to the Interaction Awards Jury for their consideration.

Over a year ago, Cooper teamed up with Practice Fusion to design an app that revolved around how medical professionals think. Instead of asking them to learn a new way of organizing information, this EMR for iPad app leveraged their natural mental model of treating and working with people. This app significantly simplified and reduced the work of using an EMR by eliminating complex navigation and abstract categories. Now doctors can clearly view and capture details about their patients, without being chained behind a desktop.

Related Reading

• UX designers Stefan Klocek and Kramer Weydt take us through their design process
• Get your own copy of the beta app from Practice Fusion

To create our new iPad interface, which just released as a beta version to active providers, Practice Fusion partnered with the award-winning design firm Cooper. Cooper is renowned for its work across the design world, from startups to over a third of the Fortune 500, with its emphasis on creating simple and enjoyable user experiences.

Our iPad User Experience Designer, Kramer Weydt (R), worked closely with Cooper’s Stefan Klocek (L) to make the Cooper design a reality. We met to chat about the process:

First of all, what exactly was your role on the iPad design?

Stefan Klocek: We are user experience designers, meaning we focus specifically on how users interact with the EMR. Instead of just designing from scratch, we first understand our user’s needs and we determine how we can fulfill those needs with the technical resources we have available.

Kramer Weydt: We’re not doctors, but we understand how people interact with devices and we learn from doctors what they need from this technology through research and interviews.

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This is the first post in a series of interviews exploring some of the fundamental questions in our field, like what user experience design (UX) is and why it matters to you. In this article, I’ve interviewed Alan Cooper, founder and President of Cooper and Chris Noessel Managing Director at Cooper and co-author of “Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction”.

How do you design a digital interaction?

Digital technology must respond in a meaningful way when a user expresses their intent. The job of a user experience designer is making this interaction feel natural and nearly invisible. As people around the world increasingly engage with digital technology on a daily basis, the need for smart UX becomes ever more apparent.

Alan says, “When a complex digital device is easy to understand and use, a UX designer has done their job.” A skilled UX designer understands the goals and mental models of users, along with the nuances of technology. He or she uses this knowledge to shape the behavior of the technology so that it all seems natural to the user, in just the way a talented author makes you forget the narrator.

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Just as the Internet powerhouses of the early 2000’s were all but forgotten, they rise with new panache. MySpace, Digg, and now AOL have undergone massive redesigns in an attempt to lure in former users, and it just might work.

Remember the race to get your favorite @gmail.com address? OMG - a GB of free storage!? Forget that hotmail email address you’ve been using since your days backpacking around Europe after college, time to switch domains. What a hassle.

Those days are over. Today, cloud storage is effectively free. The key players (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) have taken data center construction to an art form, along the way making that same infrastructure a commodity. The result: the back-end is no longer a differentiator and companies are increasingly turning to front-end innovation to make a splash.

(Source: engadget)

AOL’s new web-based email client, Alto, is an interesting new tool for managing the inbox fire hose. Among other nifty features, it analyzes your inbox and automatically categorizes your email into piles like daily deals, attachments, and social notifications - the new breed of “pseudo-spam.” Unlike the days of yore, you don’t have to go through the hassle of migrating from Gmail or Yahoo to take advantage of these new superpowers. Alto is just a new layer of svelteness on top of the old email infrastructure.

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It is very rare indeed when designers eagerly anticipate a release from Microsoft. This October’s Windows 8 release will see a new Windows Phone, the second version of the Metro UI for mobile devices. But more significantly, Windows 8 will bring the Metro interface to the desktop.

Metro on mobile and on desktop.

Metro, which won over designers, developers, and users with its colorful, transit-inspired, and minimally geometric interface, was first bundled with the Windows Phone 7 package. It was a risky - but undeniably insightful - move. Rather than simply playing catch-up to Android and iOS, the gridded interface stakes a dramatic new claim on how an OS should function on a mobile device. Rather than presenting a “home screen” where a user launches applications - an idea borrowed directly from the desktop - Metro uses the blocky launch icons to directly display the latest information and updates from within the apps themselves.

In other words, rather than launching your news app to check for the latest headline, Metro would feature those headlines right on the home screen. You’ll click on an app once you already know something of interest lies beneath. But Metro’s most striking implication is that you might not even open those apps as often anymore.

However, Microsoft’s approach to the home screen was not the first attempt at a radical departure from established mobile home screen norms. In 2010, an Android app called SlideScreen was on a similar mission, and its untimely demise shows the complications of innovating on the home screen in an environment where the handset makers and the creators of operating systems make the rules.

The SlideScreen app on Android.

SlideScreen, developed by Larva Labs, cleverly replaced the Android home screen with snippets of content you depend on the most. Get the gist of your inbox, absorb the latest headlines in your feeds, and check in on the churn of tweets and Facebook updates every time you idly flash on your phone. It was space-efficient without looking cramped - austere, but with personality.

Many early Android users (this author included) grew dependent on the immediacy: there was no need to navigate to an app or pull down a pane. The phone stopped being another media channel and became a tool again.

But in August of 2011 it was over. An ill-timed security update prevented the app from reading data from Gmail. SlideScreen could no longer “hot-wire” you straight to your messages. Developer Matt Hall begrudgingly admitted: “As of right now there appears to be no workaround as this is an intentional change to restrict access to the data. [..] As of this morning we’ve removed the app from the market.” SlideScreen was dead.

It’s a shame. SlideScreen was an important counterpoint to the prevailing norm on phone operating systems: the home screen as a list of apps you can launch. It’s a limiting norm that makes phones less useful. The “app-launcher-approach” to home screens essentially traps information and functionality in digital “lockboxes” that can’t be accessed without starting an app.

SlideScreen’s story highlights how apps themselves can’t innovate without the alignment of vision with the creators of the operating systems, consumer services, and information providers. Apps also depend on digital lockboxes that are stable and supply open data. But these conditions weren’t present in 2011, and they are even less so today. And when software ecosystems become more closed, apps like SlideScreen can’t flourish. That is likely why the Apple iOS home screen paradigm has been remained largely unchallenged.

Five years ago, the launch of Apple’s first iPhone in 2007 popularized this paradigm of precious, “gemstone” app icons. Instrumental in the phone’s success, the icons simplified access to functionality and made it obvious to novice users what a smartphone could actually do. But simplicity comes at the cost of information density and efficiency. Apart from the occasional push notification, there are precious few hints at what relevant information might be behind each icon.

iOS home screen. Image via Scrappble.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, and in spite of the efforts of the Larva Labs and the Windows phone team, there’s a real possibility that the gemstone paradigm becomes this decade’s default mobile navigation system. Why is this worrisome? Interface paradigms tend to die slow deaths.

On stationary computers and laptops, the same antiquated metaphor has guided interface development since the early 1970s. The “desktop metaphor”, as it is called, treated the computer screen as an imaginary desk, where objects like “files” and “folders” could be put. Despite some valiant efforts (at Cooper we took our stab with the Litl netbook, and Google attempted to bring the beast down with their Chrome OS), this concept has displayed a frightening resistance to technological progress and user needs.

The same thing can happen on our phones. We are facing the risk that inarticulate gemstones could become the primary way you operate your phone, even when new technology begins allowing for far superior ways to interact with smartphones. A smartphone’s ability to predict and automate actions has massively improved alongside the evolution of its impressive stack of sensors, cameras, microphones, and touch screens. Based on this knowledge, there are many ways a phone can tailor a home screen to the needs of the situation or time of day. The phone can begin to guess what I might need to know. Wouldn’t that be nice - a home screen with information I care about, rather than a list of the apps I have downloaded?

As Metro seeks to demonstrate, the main purpose of smartphones should not be to launch apps. Smartphones have a lot of impressive functionality, but not all functions are equally important. Not all functions need an icon. Home screens should facilitate important functions, and hide trivial ones. It should make it easy to communicate, help me be aware of time and place, and anticipate common information needs. The standard home screen as we know it today is not up to the task, so let us look for better ways. Let us leave the familiar behind. A better home screen is out there.

The best public transit experiences provide riders with wayfinding and signaling which makes everyone, from tourist to commuter, able to navigate the system like a pro. People who are new can easily understand which train to catch, where to get on, when to transfer and when to get off. Those who ride it every day are able to relax, focus on entertainment or reading, and when their stop is reached, gracefully exit without confusion.

Every morning I ride the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train from Berkeley to San Francisco. When I was new to BART, I spent my commute worrying that I was getting on the wrong train or missing my transfer. Now that I’m a regular, I stress about running to catch my train, and wonder whether I should try to cram myself into the packed car or wait for the next one which will have space.

There are many clever solutions that would rely on location-aware smart phones, but with over 30 miles of tunnels, cell signal is unreliable, if available at all. There are apps such as iBart Live which give riders access to live BART schedules on mobile devices. When these work, some of the trouble catching the right train and transferring is alleviated. When they don’t, because there is no signal or because the data is inaccurate, riders feel stranded and annoyed. At some point, the telecom infrastructure will be reliable enough to provide consistent, good information; but even then, there's will be more to be done to make things straightforward and easy for riders.

Outside the station

Riders have no visibility into the live train schedule until they reach the platform. Often this means running down the escalator as soon as you realize the train with the open doors is YOUR train, only to have the doors close before you can reach them.

On the outside there is no way to know which train is approaching the station

Give a heads-up to people before they enter the station. Knowing that my train is due in one minute I’d rush sooner and be able to make my train. Knowing that that the train I hear isn’t mine would allow me to step aside to let those who are tying to catch it move ahead.
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Wanna Bet is a new show on ABC wherein celebrities bet on whether “ordinary” people can accomplish extraordinary things. Whichever celebrity has the most money at the end of the program gets to donate it to the charity of his or her choice. The way it works is that the show introduces the ordinary person, describes the (usually very odd) action this person is going to attempt, and the celebrities write down their prediction and bet amount. The attempt is made, the person succeeds or fails, and then the celebrities reveal their bets to much fanfare.

So far so good, right? The trouble is that there is some kind of disconnect in the betting process. On the first episode George Takei (better known as Sulu from Star Trek) excitedly revealed that he had guessed correctly and had bet $20,000. The show’s hosts, however, informed him he had only bet $2,000. For anyone not employed as a designer of interactive systems, it looked like George Takei was having a senior moment. It was embarrassing. The other celebrities on the show spent the rest of the episode pretending to have flubbed their bets to make up for it.

So where’s the failure here? George Takei is getting on in years; maybe he’s just not very comfortable with technology. Leaving off a zero is an easy mistake, right? Maybe, except that in the very next episode of the show, the same thing happened to comedian Melissa Peterman who thought she bet $5,000 but “really” bet $6,000. She’s only 37 and sharp as a whip. The show is now two for two, and I would argue there is a failure in the system. Read More

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. Read More