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

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

View an amazing collection of new military healthcare devices in the battlefield!

“With the growing swiftness and capability of today’s technology, medical tools are increasing in their specificity to meet military healthcare needs. The combat environment calls for particular solutions; on the battlefield, where time is of essence, military healthcare providers need the right implement, at the right time. With extensive research and the integration of the latest civilian technology, innovators are finally poised to meet these needs.”

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!

Here’s the beginning of the Daily Artifacts article:

 $1.85 billon dollar customer experience mistake made by Walmart (a conservative estimate of lost revenue that does not include the hundreds of millions spent on remodeling stores)
- What happened? Walmart rolled out “Project Impact” – a major change in strategy and store customer experience – starting in 2008 
- Why? Customers answered a Walmart survey and told Walmart that they would prefer less clutter in the stores
- Walmart revised their decades-old strategy of low price and wide selection
- 15% of the inventory removed from the stores 
- 30% – some suppliers reported losing 30% of their stock in Walmart stores due to the revamp
- Removed pallets of items like juice boxes or sweatshirts stacked in the centers of aisles. 
- Slimmed down merchandise on “end caps,” displays at the ends of aisles
- Shortened shelves
- Revamp not only removed items but cost “millions of dollars” per store in refurbishment costs
- Saw an immediate loss in sales and decline in same-store sales data

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!!