Check out the article on BBC Technology News!

“To the heart of design” is a phrase that best describes the largest and most successful World Usability Day (WUD) event produced in Phoenix, Arizona, since its first event in 2007.

PayPal hosted and sponsored the event, kicked off with a multimedia presentation of examples from its extensive interaction design team members, numbering 250 strong, worldwide. From personas with a humorous “South Park” feel to in-home studies of individuals such as a deeply committed yet overwhelmed soccer mom, to before-and-after designs that resulted in capturing millions in revenue, the presentations illustrated best practices in user-centered design and methods today. Theo Mandel, Ph.D., Founder of Interface Design and Development and Vice President of the Arizona UPA Chapter, organized the event.

Taking best practices into action, Laura Faulkner, PhD, gave an inspiring keynote address that moved to the “heart of the designer.” Expressing the global WUD theme, Dr. Faulkner sparked the audience to see their own work in new ways, and achieve ”Design for Social Change” by their daily interactions with the many real humans required to create and deliver amazing designs. To this end, she brought diverse experience from her work as long-time UPA-International conferences co-chair, a research scientist with The University of Texas at Austin, a consultant/strategist with FalconDay Consulting, and even her experience as a certified yoga teacher.

The event, at PayPal’s new facility in Chandler, was selected as one of only 5 worldwide WUD Global Partner Events. The 100 attendees were each given a PayPal tote filled with merchandise from event sponsors. Software valued at over $2,500, from Axure and TechSmith, along with other prizes were awarded in a raffle at the end of the event. The PayPal team inspired job seekers with discussion of how it utilizes design professionals, lit up creative thoughts with peeks into exciting current and future projects.

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

Any time you mess with the user experience, you’re going to risk backlash. If change is based on a solid understanding of your customers and the extent to which this disruption will – eventually – work for them, the effects will be not just survivable, but allow you to thrive.

Netflix committed a customer experience faux pas and the question is – Will Facebook do the same with their new total site redesign?

<< Check it out on Forbes >>

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’

There’s just one problem: not everyone calling themselves a user experience designer is actually a user experience designer. Unfortunately the designation isn’t as clear cut as a doctor or a lawyer. Most professions are certified and regulated, so you don’t see impostor behavior often — and when you do, it’s typically in the form of a news article about someone going to jail for fraud. Perhaps more analogously, even those in non-regulated occupations like writers and programmers would have a hard time passing themselves off as such without actually writing or actually programming.

So, how do you tell is someone is REALLY a true user experience professional, or a wannabe? Whitney posts a 10-point list answering the question, “You’re not a user experience designer if…”

It’s a good overview of some of the key things we focus on as UX professionals. Check it out at Whitney’s Blog!

Some myths have been around for many years, such as the myth, “You may not have more than 7 +/- 2 items in a drop-down menu.” This myth about human cognition dates back to George Miller’s famous article published in 1956, “The Mangical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:  Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” This seminal work has been taken way too literally, especially regarding lists, drop-downs and navigation items.

The website, UX Myths (http://uxmyths.com/) currently has 31 web design myths, ranging from human cognition and perception myths, as I described above, to myths about good web design and the UX and usability process.

If you are trying to educate executives and iinfluencers about UX design, learning about the web design and usability,this is a great place to learn and share. Enjoy!

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