Transcript for this Podcast

Today I had the pleasure of talking with the Chief Experience Officer and Healthcare Principal at Mad*Pow, Amy Cueva.

Amy partners with clients like the New England Journal of Medicine, Google, Aetna, Fidelity, and Monster to create strong multi-channel experience strategies, intuitive digital experiences, and streamlined processes.

We discuss the many different ways social technologies can conceivably simplify communication flows, enhance access, increase information sharing, and augment timely collaboration, resulting in faster, more informed decisions, improving clinical outcomes.

You can download slides from Amy’s recent presentation to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Social Media and Patient-Centric Design: Facilitating Provider / Patient Relationships.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are meant to provide primary care physicians with the ability to share comprehensive patient files, across hospitals and patient-teams, so that they can make better care decisions. There is enormous potential for integration of social networking technologies to enrich the EMR experience.

A few examples of Social networking for EMRs include:

* 2 doctors in different locations could treat the same patient or obtain opinions on treatment. They could both access the patient’s EMR, and deliberate possible diagnoses and treatment options.
* Doctor-to-doctor, and doctor-to-nurse communication could occur LIVE via Online chat, Voice (VOIP/Skype), Video (Webcam/Skype Video), Telephone.
* Communication could also occur asynchronously via Text message (Twitter/Yammer), Email, Voice (Voicemail/Voicethread), Video (Voicethread/Webcam).
* Doctors could digitally mark-up files in the EMR such as X-Rays to communicate visual thinking to their peers.
* The care team and the patient would benefit from the interaction but there is also downstream value in having the discussion and relevant subject matter parsed and elevated up to the larger community.

User experience design in the health care space is of keen importance. As designers we have the capability to expedite the diagnostic process, resulting in both proactive and preventative measures for treatment that is more comfortable and effective. We can reduce errors, reduce costs, and essentially improve outcomes for all involved.

President Obama’s stimulus package (ARRA) includes 19 billion dollars which has been earmarked for health care research, technology and improvements. In the next few years there will be a great deal of activity and change in this space. We have the ability to shape that change in a positive direction via the patient-centric design approach that comes naturally to us. We also have the opportunity to share assets and patterns and build the standards that will positively affect learnability, adoption and momentum.

The current medical system is in dire straights. We need to start looking at tools that are in place today without putting on blinders to both the current and future potential risks and barriers to success. A few of these include, the following:

* Doctors are outnumbered: There are many more patients than doctors.
* Frequency & access: How often do you have access to a doctor vs. access to a computer, phone or mobile device?
* The information is out there: In our minds, in websites and DBs. Tech and SM frees the info, makes it searchable/shareable.
* We have the tools: Healthcare is behind.
* People care: They are motivated, there is a strong sense of community, karma, give and take.
* It is already happening: The Pew Internet and American Life Project Survey says 61% of Americans go online for health information, with a majority turning to user-generated content.

Thank you to all of my listeners for another year of helping to provide greater context to the content we all share! Many new projects underway for 2010, two of which I’ll be sharing early in January!

Happy holidays and best wishes for a great New Year to friends, family, and colleagues around the world…Cheers!

Transcript for this Podcast

I had the pleasure of talking with Brad Nunnally about the importance of failure to innovate; moving teams and individuals to new ideas and future successes.

I first met Brad at this year’s IDEA conference in Toronto. You can read his brilliant overview of the two day event over on Johnny Holland.

Part of the inspiration for his three part article on failure came from this video by Scott Berkun.

In Part One Brad discusses the importance of Retrospectives and Documenting Warning Signs to learn from past mistakes.

In Part Two he covers the opposing yet equally important issues of Assigning Blame and Highlighting the Success of others.

In Part Three Brad discusses why it’s so important to Embrace Failure and to also keep an Open Mind realizing that everyone makes mistakes.

In our conversation, Brad and I note quotes from other UX professionals around the world. Their feedback can be found on the Wiki I created for this podcast.

Many thanks to Eric Reiss, Jan Jursa, and Valeska O’Leary for sharing their insights on the Wiki and to Daniel Szuc and Christian Crumlish who dropped me an email with their thoughts.

I’d like to encourage others within and outside of the UX industries to build on the questions provided on the Wiki.

I think you’ll find those who have garnered the most success in their industry are the ones who have failed more often than not. They are the ones who have had the courage to keep pursuing ideas, evolving them over time to learn from mistakes and create an even greater product or service than originally imagined.

At events like the IA Summit and the Interaction Design conference, I think we should be discussing the topic of failure and not just with / amongst presenters but as a common conversational thread with all attendees.

As a suggestion I believe conference organizers should provide a space where people can write, sketch, and share past failures and lessons learned. I saw this idea when I attended the first annual VizThink conference.

In addition to most workshops providing attendees the opportunity to share via sketching (see image below), large whiteboards were set up in the pre-conference area allowing others to draw out ideas which, in turn, encouraged discussion amongst participants about the illustrations.

Most recently, at the first annual UX Australia conference, Oliver Weidlich discussed several examples of interface failure.

To hear his 10 minute talk about this presentation make your way over to the UX Australia Media page. You can also subscribe to all the shows through their iTunes subscription.

On today’s show I chat with Content Strategist and Partner at FatDUX in Copenhagen, Denmark Eric Reiss about leadership in the age of information.

Eric points out that leadership isn’t about creating a buzz it’s about creating results. In essence a leader is someone you can trust to make a good decision on your behalf.

Younger people can do the job in many cases but they lack the experience to help them avoid pitfalls common to anyone starting out. Our experience in life determines our perspective and that perspective in turn shapes our unique reality.

This is a fundamental reason why we have a difficult time communicating effectively; we value different ideas based on experiences that shape what is important to us as individuals versus that which can be left undiscovered.

Eric discusses the work of Eli Whitney and the way in which he changed how we work during the Industrial revolution through the development of interchangeable parts. This in turn lead to the creation of products that forever changed the workplace from one of artisan to that of an employee in a factory.

In turn this lead to the advent of the corporate culture and to this day businesses discuss how to best motivate employees. We still talk about the “carrot” and “stick”. Prior to the industrial revolution there was just the “stick”. You had to do what you were told. Then with the creation of factories and different managerial styles, the “carrot” or rewards to motivate people came into play.

Eric argues that there needs to be a third element to the “carrot” and the “stick” – not quite sure what that might be but we need to start debating and thinking more about that element.

“If I haven’t experienced it, it can’t be true.” A mantra that many have, and yet holding fast to such a thought process prevents us from gaining new experiences and by extension improve our capacity to lead others.

The video below was a framework I shared with good friend and colleague in Philadelphia Michael Carvin @mcarvin about how to move the conversation away from the usual debates that force projects to compromise and lead your team back to a focus on those for whom you are designing.

Seek First to Understand from Jeff Parks on Vimeo.

User Experience has much more to do than the web! “Back in the day” Eric was the Assistant Director of plays at the Royal Theater. In one particular play the scene took place in Italy in an authentic old world Italian kitchen; yet no one could get into the scene, it just wasn’t working. Eric suggested they fry up some onion and garlic stimulating the olfactory senses of what it would smell like in a real Italian kitchen allowing both the actors, and during the live performance the audience, to feel as if they were literally in the old country. (Plus snack sales went through the roof!)

I suggest that the IAI and IxDA board members should find ways to interact with their members through video and engage with their members in a more human way.

Eric is helping to build EuroIA 2009 this year being held in Copenhagen Denmark at the Scandic Hotel. Speakers are flying in from 14 different countries; an event that is shaping up to be an incredible opportunity to learn from those both within and outside the Information Architecture discipline.

Today I had the pleasure of connecting with Sam Ng from New Zealand and his work in building the tools for the Optimal Workshop.

Sam talks about his efforts in starting the company six years ago, and his many experiences that have lead him to the creation of Treejack, OptimalSort, and Chalkmark.

We discuss how these tools are making some of the traditional jobs of those within our disciplines, unnecessary. With that realization, there is also a wonderful opportunity to help clients create a better user experience and extend the conversation and ideas beyond what we’ve been able to offer to date.

Sam and I talk about how we’re shaped by our experiences and how we’re at a tipping point for our disipline based on the growth of the field. Sam predicts that the demand for user experience will outstrip the supply of quality user experience professionals in the very near future.

Economics, not enough time, and a lack of understanding about the work of the User Experience community have been the common reasons, from Sam’s experience, as to why organizations don’t adopt UX into work flows.

Will these tools ever replace the need for the UX profession? I argue that this will never happen and while Sam agrees with this statement he does believe that some aspects of user testing may be taken away from the UX professional. Again, this will allow the UX community to make better recommendations to clients when quick answers are required.

Sam believes there will be an interesting intersection of quantitative and qualitative analysis with the creation of tools like those offered by the Optimal Workshop.

Chalkmark, for example, is the most popular tool offered by the Optimal Workshop for the wider community at large; allowing them to do user testing in a couple of hours with limited time and budgets.

These tools are great at allowing us to ask more questions, which in turn will lead us to better answers. Evolving from a purely academic background, we need to dedicate more time to “wearing the hats” of our users and clients. With the evolution of tools available to the UX community, this will allow us the time, space, and budget to do just that!

Many thanks to Sam for taking time out of his busy day to talk with me and share his experiences in creating the Optimal Workshop.

Hope to see everyone in Toronto for the Idea Conference! If I haven’t had a chance to meet you please come by and say hello. :)

Looking forward to heading to Jamaica on behalf of Zed Jamaica with my colleague Kristina Mausser from Digital Word. I’ll be presenting a full day workshop on Information Architecture and User Experience and Kristina will be presenting a two day workshop on writing for the web. Then together we’ll be presenting a half day workshop on Social Media.

Today I had the great pleasure of talking with Steve Baty from Meld Consulting and Donna Spencer at Maadmob about their extraordinary efforts in putting together UX Australia.

Donna and Steve describe how they wanted to create a conference that modeled the essence of User Centered Design in every detail.

Calls for presentations weren’t required to have a focus towards a specific discipline; diversity of experiences lead to innovation. One only needs to look to the speakers presenting at UX Australia to see how this approach to creating a conference will inspire others long after the event has wrapped up.

Even the smallest details for the conference were given to the global community to ensure a great experience . A contest was held to create the badges attendees and speakers would wear during the conference.

The competition winner is Matt Balara. He triggered the discussion about requirements (on Flickr and on Twitter) and iterated the design based on the feedback. Matt will get a one-year subscription to Saasu (one of our fantastic sponsors)…We decided to use Tom Voirol’s design, which was based on Matt’s, with an upside-down schedule at the bottom. Tom will get a subscription to an Optimal Workshop product (who are also a fantastic sponsor).

Most of the conferences in Australia such as Web Directions and Edge of the Web are web focused. This is the first conference being held in Australia that is focused exclusively on user experience.

Both Steve and Donna hope that people will start to expand the notion of user experience beyond the creation of great web services. The opportunity to learn and inspire will come not only from the great diversity of presentations but also from attendees flying in from every corner of the world.

In addition to UX Australia, Donna recently published her book Card Sorting – Designing Usable Categories, through Rosenfeld Media, and was the lead consultant in building the Optimal Workshop’s online card sorting tool Optimal Sort

Steve is a member of the board with the Interaction Design Association, initiated the UX Book Club, and is one of the “Kahunas” at Johnny Holland, the peer written webzine that will be recording and publishing presentations after the event.

With a conference designed down to the last detail according to the ideas and wishes of those attending, this will undoubtedly be a remarkable experience for one and all!

Thank you ClickTale for your continued sponsorship of the i.a. podcast! Finally a web analytics tool that provides context to data including the ability to watch movies of visitor behavior, as well as Scrolling Heat Maps, Form Analytics and many more features to help your organization make intelligent decisions to improve the User Experience of your site.

Idea 2009 Social and Experience Design is coming to Toronto – first time north of the border speakers include Leisa Reichelt, Christina Wodtke, Luke Wrobluski, Christian Crumlish, Nathan Curtis and many more.

You can hear presentations from last year where Idea was in Chicago over on boxes and arrows podcast.

Registration for UX Australia is up and running! Steve and Danielle Baty, Donna Spencer, and Andrew Boyd have put together an incredible line up of speakers including: Daniel Szuc a past guest on the i.a. podcast where we talked about UX in China, Gerry Gaffney from the User Experience Podcast, Will Evans, Alex Wright Director of UX and Product Research at the NY Times and author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages and many many more.

A big thanks to Johnny Holland for inviting to me to share ideas on that great webzine! My first article is due to publish early next week and includes a video of sharing a framework about how we can move our conversations in the UX communities back to the people for whom we are designing, rather than getting hung up on definitions and titles.

Interaction ‘10 is ramping up with that conference coming in February 2010 to Savannah, Georgia. I’m looking forward to future conversations with Jennifer Bove and Bill DeRouchey about what they are working hard at creating. Shaping up to be the best IxDA conference to date!

UXPanama is coming up as well! Jorge Arango, current President of the IAI is putting together the UX conference in Panama. You can check out videos up on YouTube put together in part by BootStudio Jorge’s UX design group in Panama.

On today’s show I chat with Chris Pallé about The UX Workshop. We talk about our work and the generous support of various communities of practice and individuals who have supported our efforts to date. This is a light-hearted discussion about how we got started, where we’re at now, and our genuine desire to engage the global UX community in conversations and sharing ideas.

We genuinely want the community to help us build The UX Workshop and look forward to helping people around the world move from theory to understanding by sharing experiences.

While attending the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, TN I had the pleasure of gathering some of the leading minds in the fields of IA, UX, and IxD to talk about the subject of Ubiquitous Computing and related ideas.

Be sure to check out the work and initiatives being taken on by of all my guests for today’s podcast; remarkable work gentlemen!

Steve Baty is working hard to put together a tremendous line up of presenters for the upcoming conference, UX Australia. Steve also formed the UX Book Club; is a contributing author at Johnny Holland Magazine; and is the Principal at Meld in Sydney, Australia.

Will Evans runs Semantic Foundry in Washington D.C. and is currently part of the group helping to promote and put together the IDEA conference being held in Toronto this September. Looking forward to helping you with Idea and Interactions ‘10 in February, Will.

Joe Lamantia is speaking at the upcoming Enterprise Search Summit in NYC in May. Joe is also writing a column on designing for ubiquitous computing for the magazine UXmatters.com and he’ll publish another one in May.

(I actually had the pleasure of interviewing Joe on a two part series on Ethics and the Web in June of last year.)

Matthew Milan and Jon Tirmandi run Normative Design out of Toronto. Matt gave a great talk at the IA Summit entitled, Leading with Insight

Joe Sokohl is the User Experience Lead at PracticeWorks. Joe gave a great presentation at the IA Summit entitled, A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely. Joe is currently in Shanghai on business; hope the journey has been a great success, Joe!

Todd Zaki Warfel is the founder and President at Messagefirst. Todd is speaking at several events around the world, including:

July 1st and 2nd Université du SI Paris, France Geeks and Bosses
July 14th UPenn Philadelphia, PA. Higher Education Web Symposium
August 24-28 Agile2009 Chicago, IL. UX Design Studio Experience
October 8-11 UX Challenge Longyearbyen, Norway. UX Challenge

Many thanks to all for taking time out at the Summit to share your ideas and insights. I hope to be able to have more discussions like this one with others within and outside of the IA / UX / IxD / Design disciplines later this year.

Thanks to Chris Greenfield who spoke the Ottawa Social Media Breakfast. I first met Chris at the VizThink conference last year.

Chris gave a great presentation that spoke the truth regarding social media, called “Social Media Bullshit”. In essence he spoke out about how all social mediums are simply a means of connecting people with one another.

The value of such tools is the ability to bring people together to share ideas. If you’re a New Media Douchebag, you’re not contributing to the conversation – you’re impeding it!

Special thanks to the volunteers for their time and energies in helping to capture the audio from the 2009 IA Summit for the Boxes and Arrows Podcast.

We ran into many technical issues at the Summit this year, including most rooms that were not mic’d for questions. As a result I had to remove the questions b/c without that audio, the answers provided no context.

Thanks to Gene Smith and nForm out in Edmonton for chatting with me about doing some video for their upcoming Web Strategy Summit. Although this time can’t work, I look forward to helping share experiences in the form of audio and video at future events.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Ginny Redish, author of Letting Go of the Words – Writing Web Content that Works.

To read more about Ginny’s Book, you can visit her site and you can also download two sample chapters from what I would consider a “must-have” resource for both business and government.

Along with great examples and stories relating to the importance of a content strategy, we also discuss:

* The importance of emotion when writing for the web
* Scenario writing when building Personas
* How important is the home page?
* Still trying to blast the myth of the fold
* When and when not to use PDF
* Pathway pages
* Eye-tracking analysis
* Creating content in an inverted pyramid style
* Push versus Pull
* The importance of a sans serif font and choosing the appropriate size of font
* The importance of providing proper context to the content being written

Ginny will be leading a session at the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering in Orlando March 11 – 13, where she’ll be speaking on March 13 on Writing eLearning Content that Works.

Ginny is also facilitating a webinar hosted by Rosenfeld Media on May 28 entitled Shifting Your Focus: Content as Conversation.

Congratulations to Andrew Boyd, Donna Spencer, Steve & Danielle Batty for organizing UX Australia taking place 25-27 August 2009 at the Hotel Realm, a new 5 star hotel in Barton.

Feedback from colleagues who attended Interactions ‘09 and Web Directions North were that both events were huge successes! Congratulations to event organizers from both conferences.

Chris Pallé and I continue to make good progress with the UX Workshop. Looking forward to more feedback from others around the world about tools and ideas that would be of greatest value – so please add your thoughts today!

Heading back to the IA Summit this year to Podcast for Boxes and Arrows. Looking to set a new personal record – over 50 presentations / conversations in a few days. Turn on the coffee and keep it comin’!

In part two of my series on Generations and Technology I had the privilege of talking with Mr. Jason Kirby and his class at Hillcrest High School in Ottawa, Canada.

We talked at length about Facebook; online bullying; favorite websites; and how much of the communication being done by kids in high school are through applications and cellular technologies. All of these experiences will forever change the way our future leaders in business and government will expect to be able to communicate.

Working with others in our community, I’m helping to create The UX Workshop. In an effort to extend the conversation beyond mailing lists, the UX Workshop is looking for feedback from everyone in our community, regardless of years experience, published or not, etc.

If you’re passionate about Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Uxer Experience, or Human Factors please provide feedback on wht you’d like a truly global community to be all about. We’re listening…

It looks like I’ll be heading back to the IA Summit this year taking place in Memphis TN to record and publish all of the presentations as I did last year for Boxes and Arrows.

Many thanks to ASIS&T as well as Boxes and Arrows for another opportunity to share ideas and insights with the global community; very kind!

Congratulations to Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella on the recent publication of their new book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (2nd Edition). I look forward to the opportunity to interview Christina and Austin on a future podcast about this great publication.

Other conferences that are happening this year that I would highly recommend from my experiences in attending last year, include:

VizThink
MX – Managing eXperience
UX Week

If you’d like to experience these events, you can listen to conversations I had with presenters and attendees. You can also subscribe to the Boxes and Arrows podcast through iTunes for all past and future shows I’ll be producing.

Best wishes to organizers for Interactions ‘09 in Vancouver this year, as well as Web Directions North, taking place in Denver Colorado.

This is the first of a four part series I’m producing about how different generations use technology from websites to cell phones to gaming systems.

We’re at a challenging time in our history. We face a global economic crisis; the largest generation in North American history, and the last one to work for a single organization their whole career, retiring; combined with a way of doing business that blows away traditional ROI measures.

And yet, there are amazing opportunities to learn and share like never before!

We have the capacity to innovate and build even greater products and services, by actively listening to our clients and colleagues, for whom they are intended.

Many thanks to Mrs. Anne Marie Kirby and all of the students in her Grade 6 class for allowing me the opportunity to learn from, and share your ideas, with the global community.

If you’re in Sydney Australia, be sure to get get tickets for Web-Blast ‘08 on December 5th. Tickets are limited so be sure to sign up soon!

Shortly after my last conversation with Daniel Szuc about User Experience in China, Daniel was kind enough to introduce me to Ginny Redish who presented at User Friendly 2008.

Ginny was kind enough to send me a signed copy of her book, Letting Go of the Words – Creating Web Content that Works. We’ll be talking about the ideas within her book and recent experiences and conversations with other professionals around the world on a future podcast.