Want to know more details on the resurgence of user experience? Check it out on Small Business Trends – Simplify This: User Experience Experts Are in Demand

Here’s my section of the article:

Beyond gestures, finger flicks, touch interfaces, and rotating objects around to change orientation, the smaller real estate of mobile platforms is also causing design tool providers to rethink the layout and structure of their programs. Progressive disclosure, a longstanding user interface principle that presents only the minimum data required for the task at hand in order to reduce clutter, is a far more important UI design principle today now that pixel space is at a premium, notes Theo Mandel, PhD, president of Interface Design and Development, LLC, a user interface consultancy.

“More fully featured applications tend to throw lots of stuff at users and you can’t do that on a mobile device,” Mandel explains. “With progressive disclosure, you only give people what they want at the time, and then you give them ways to go deeper when and if they want.”

View the entire article >> Design Tools Get the Human Touch

Here’s an article titled “AMA report: Standardizing EMRs would ‘stifle innovation‘” that addresses these issues.

The topics of usability of electronic medical records (EMRs)–and their ability to “effectively integrate” with clinical decision-making and work flow–will be on the agenda when the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates meets next month in Chicago. The focus, contained in a trustees report, will be on how these issues have not been adequately addressed so far.

The trustees report addresses a 2009 resolution that called for the AMA to promote the development and universal adoption of a “standardized user interface” for all EMR systems, and to advocate for a federal mandate for interoperability of EMRs as part of its healthcare reform agenda.

For more information, view these links:

• AMA Board of Trustees report (.pdf)
• NextGov Article

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and  Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) are working to provide guidelines for healthcare software usability.

Healthcare providers may soon have guides that describe the usability of electronic health records – designed to make the steps to adopt and use health IT clear and transparent and, in the process, improve patient safety.

Among the efforts, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is developing a set of procedures that are objective and repeatable for evaluating, testing and validating the usability of electronic health records and other health IT systems, said Lana Lowry, NIST health IT usability project lead.

Usability guidelines and evaluation techniques in healthcare are sorely needed. Keep up to date on these efforts here:

• Government Health IT 
• Certification/Adoption Workgroup
• ONC awards $60M for health IT “breakthroughs’

Here’s a summary of the conference on Mad*Pow, the organizer of the event:

Mad*Pow and Claricode are partnering to host the first-of-its-kind Healthcare Experience Design Conference. The one-day conference will be held on April 11, 2011 at the Fairmont Copley Hotel in Boston, and is designed to inspire and empower thought leaders, students, and working professionals in the fields of healthcare design, usability, and technology development.

Conference details, including featured speakers and registration information can be found at Healthcare Experience Design -Improving Health Through Design and Technology

As a long-time user experience practitioner, I was taken aback by these attack from many sides. However, as my partner at Success PragmatiQ, Larry Marine, and I have come to realize, there is some truth to these concerns. Larry and I have addressed these issues in a number of articles and blog posts. Read on…

First, there has been a historic battle in Agile development camps as to the importance and place in the agile process. Many agile developers don’t see a need for up-front user research and product design. Unfortunately, agile is a development process and not a design process. Larry Marine and I addressed this problem in a recent article, “The Grand Design in Improving Agile Success,” on the new Software Quality Connection website. Our approach is that up-front, user-centered research can define users’ problems and create a design that solves these problems. User experience design can then be integrated into the agile process with parallel sprints that preceed development work. Read our article and let us know what you think!

Secondly, other articles have stated that user-centric design approaches don’t produce breakthrough designs. Read “User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea” at Fast Company’s Co.Design. Their premise is that listening to users and user-led design produces incremental improvements to design and sameness rather than innovative products. Our response to this is presented in Larry’s blog, “Mediocrity in Design.” Our response will definitely stir the pot! Again, please let us know what you think.

Finally, Larry was interviewed in Boulder by Allison Tatterson, where he spoke about user experience and what product managers should know about it. View the interview text and video. Here’s a snippet of what Larry had to say:

Every interaction someone has with a product, service, or company, creates an “experience,” including the branding, messaging, product positioning, sales channels, ordering/purchasing process, as well as the actual use of the product. Every touch-point combines to create a general perception by the users, and, as the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link. That experience sets the tone of how that user will perceive the company and all aspects of it, including other products and services. User-experience design is the process of managing those experience touch points to achieve a specific desired effect. Good experience design is all about setting and managing specific expectations and experiences.

Along these lines, I wrote a brief article, ”Effective Website Design – It’s all about managing expectations!” – in RMDMA Magazine (Page 4). Same topic – managing expectations about website design.

We hope this will generate comments and discussion about the drawbacks and improvements to be made in user experience and user-centered design. There’s nothing like a frontal attack to rally the troups!!

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals. Our mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organizations in product development and management. This is accomplished by providing resources for professional development, information, collaboration and promotion of new product development and management.

Session Summary: 

Agile is not the proverbial Silver Bullet. In fact, the common misperceptions about Agile processes doom many a project. In this presentation, Larry and Theo will discuss some of the common mistakes witnessed in the real world and how to avoid them.

Agile processes are development processes, not design processes. Designing products iteratively, while you develop provides rather poorly designed products. This might be great for engineers, but is not so attractive or useable by the customers.

In essence, you cannot achieve revolutionary designs with an evolutionary process. Iterative design is an evolutionary design method that incrementally improves an initial design. If the initial concept is flawed all you end up doing is designing the wrong thing, very well. Larry and Theo will discuss how accurately prioritizing what tasks your product should support for the end user helps eliminate unnecessary “features” that steal time from your project, thus ensuring you have the time to do it right.

The reality is that you need to design first, and build later. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. You would not let your carpenters design your building, would you? Larry and Theo will discuss how Agile processes also benefit from a clearly defined set of blueprints, and they will also go over how they used their knowledge of Agile to identify a gaping hole in Hollander’s product offering by integrating their design efforts with their new Scrum processes.Join us for a clarifying look at Agile processes and learn tools to improve your success developing new products.

<< View the RM PDMA Event >>

Here’s what it’s all about:

Health 2.0’s original tag line of ‘user-generated healthcare’ contains the germ of a compelling idea—patients are using new tools to guide their own care. And now those tools are starting to integrate with the health care system. Doctors, patients, and health care organizations are all starting to use a new generation of online and mobile technologies which are fundamentally changing the way health care works.

The Health 2.0 Conference is the leading showcase of cutting-edge technologies in health care, including Online Communities, Search and lightweight Tools for consumers to manage their health and connect to providers online.

Check out the Health 2.0 2010 Developer Challenge Website!

P.S. I’ve just joined the Challenge as an expert. View my Member Page.

In this article, we share with you the best of the best, cream of the crop sites, galleries, online publications, and libraries devoted to sharing information and exploring concepts pertaining to User Interface design patterns. Use these recommended sources to gain knowledge about a particular UI problem or to gain inspiration and insight on best practices, techniques, and examples of exemplary UI designs. Great thank-you goes to Pavel Konoplitski for providing us with related resources.

<< Here’s the article >>

Luke  Wroblewski writes about some new websites that lay out registration forms in a narrative format rather than a standard grid format. Here’s an example:

 A/B user testing showed that the narrative style form increased conversion rates by 25-40%. This new style goes against conventional UI guidelines of trying to lay out forms to enhance scanning vs. reading. This new style follows the reading style, which may prove better for common registration forms that ask information such as, “Who are you, what’s your e-mail address, where do you live, etc.?”

It is too early to see who wins this contest, but it is refreshhing to see new, innovative ideas in UI design!

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

<< View Luke W’s blog >>