Elements of User Experience for Healthcare Programs

User Experience&Cambridge BioMarketing
July 28, 2010

Let’s talk about…
What is User Experience Design?
What do User Experience Designers do?
How is User Experience Design incorporated into Cambridge BioMarketing’s process and work?
Hello!

User Experience Design is not…
…about digital or the technology.
Because it doesn’t have to be digital.
…about wireframes.
…about sitemaps.
These are tools to convey an intended user experience,but they’re not the core of it.
…user interface design.
Again, because it’s not about digital or the technology.
User Experience Design is aboutUsers, Experiences, and Design.

Design always has a user.
Users are the people who use a product, certainly, but they’re also the ones who make your product a success. Design for them.
User Experience Design
What is User Experience Design? The User
“Focus on the user and all else will follow.”
– #1 of Google’s Ten things we know to be true

Users have experiences: Events and activities which users personally encounter, undergo, and live through.
What is User Experience Design?  The Experience

Users have experiences in ecosystems.
The physical environment in which the experience takes place, the digital interface lives, and the social interactions occur.
Where is it? Outdoors? Indoors? Is the user at home? At work? At a trade show or conference?
The interface itself, as well as the physical design/industrial design of the device with the interface.
What’s the platform? Is it a website? An embedded UI, such as on a kiosk, or a digital camera? Is it a mobile application? What are the constraints of the device? What are the inputs? Mouse? Keyboard? Touch screen?
The social factors that may come into play when the user is using the device in the environment.
Is someone assisting the user? For multiplayer games, are the other players in the same room or remote? Is it used in crowded places? Is privacy a concern, as with ATMs?

These components affect behaviors—they affect what users do.You can design these components, and therefore affect behavior (if not design behavior).

Users will have experiences, regardless of whether we design them.There is a hierarchy of experiences…

The Accidental Experience
These links open up PDFs, which may launch another application, yet the user is given no indication of this beforehand.
These are mediocre products and services, if not terrible ones.
They aren’t designed for the entire ecosystem. Often just focus on the technology.
Essentially, doing a website because you can, without additional research or planning, or following best practices in design.
The site asks users to engage with the site and identify who they are by selecting an option from the drop-down. However, this interaction requires that the user click to engage with the site, when the user may not have decided to engage with the site.
A better solution, which supports visitors’ concerns regarding privacy, may be to display the options as individual links instead of hiding them in a dropdown.
[Name withheld]

The Usable Experience
These are good products and services! Be proud of developing these.
In the digital space, they’re often visually appealing.
Research may have been a part of the design process, often competitive research.
These products and services often meet business goals.
[Name withheld]

The Transcendent Experience
Gmail completely rethought how email works by understanding the key tasks that people need to perform. One essential part to Gmail’s new model for email was grouping messages by conversation.
These are excellent, world-class products and services.
These are beyond usable. They transcendcore functionality, beyond business goals to improve people’s lives.
These products and services are visually appealing.
This is forward-thinking. This is what defines trends, not what follows them.
They’re not about the bells and whistles, but those embellishments can delight users and allow them to emotionally connect with it.
We hunted high and low for examples of this within the pharma space. We looked for sites where there were innovative helpful tools for patients or HCPs, or innovative tools to convey information.
We looked for examples where it clearly shows a strong understanding of the ecosystem, as well as the patient journey or HCP’s perspective, that can only be drawn from research.
However, the pharma space did not provide any such examples, so we looked elsewhere.
In other email clients, if you accidentally clicked “Reply” instead of “Forward” before typing in the email box, you need to retype your email once you start a new forwarded email. However, Gmail allows users to switch the format of the email from Reply to Forward with just a single click.
Gmail http://gmail.com/

What is User Experience Design?  The Design
Design is… “the process of conceiving and creating things in the hope of making life easier and more enjoyable.”
– Alice RawsthornDesign critic of the International Herald Tribune
This is her “Design and Things” definition, one of many definitions of design. But it highlights that User Experience Design is design. The term design should not be applied just to the visual treatment of a product.

What do User Experience Designers do?

What do User Experience Designers do?  Background
There are two disciplines that are useful for User Experience Design.
Psychology
Attention & Perception
Memory
Cognitive Load
Experimental Design
Engineering
Technology
Interaction Components
Technical Abilities & Constraints
Background, Education, and Training for UX

“Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition.”
– Jane Fulton SuriPartner and Creative Director, IDEO
Design Research
What do User Experience Designers do?  Design Research
Understand the ecosystem:
Physical, social, digital
Understand the users:
Needs, desires, habits, perceptions

Users have needs
Explicit needs
These are explicitly listed by the client. For example, let’s say a client wants a site for a product, and that the site needs to allow users to register to receive more information. They are telling us explicitly that they want to include specific information in it.
Implicit needs
These needs are not articulated, but are implicitly a part of the requirements. For example, for the previous example, the client didn’t tell us that we need to include links to the online registration forms, but we know to include it because their users will need a way to get to such content..
Latent needs
These are not articulated or even assumed. These are often only ascertained by research, often field work. This is why you have to observe more than listen, because users may be completely unaware of these needs, or may not have identified the opportunities that will be uncovered through research.
One of our clients came to us with the insight that cancer patients spend a lot of time waiting at doctors’ offices for treatments. This can be a very scary time for them, and the rules of many doctor’s offices and hospitals don’t allow them to use their mobile phones, which is a way they use to reach out to family and friends for support. The latent need that can be determined from this research is the need to connect to others for support, in such a way that will be permitted by doctor’s offices and hospitals. This sort of need can be culled from anecdotes (stories from the field), but most often it comes from field work, accompanying patients to their doctor’s visits.
Identifying latent needs designers understand that ecosystem so that the final product can transcend the business requirements.

Design Research throughout our process

Benefits of Design Research
Every design decision is a best guess.
It’s based on all your expertise, and everything you’ve learned from the client, from your competitive research, from other various guidelines. It’s an informed guess, but it’s still a guess.
Make better guesses.
The design is a hypothesis.
Accept or reject your hypothesis.
And revise it!

IA: Information Architecture
The structure and organization of information
Deliverable: Sitemaps: Where the content lives within the formal structure of a site
What do User Experience Designers do?  Design

IA: Information Architecture, continued
Deliverable: Wireframes: The skeleton of the pages within a site

IxD: Interaction Design
The design of interactions: What users do and how the system responds
Deliverables: User Flows & Storyboards

Information Design
The design of the visual representation of data
Often in charts and tables, but also maps and signage, so that data can be understood clearly and efficiently, rather than just for visual appeal.
These two charts follow best practices for chart design, with one exception. Each have the exact same data in them. One of them is easier to understand than the other. Which one is it?
Research shows that the chart on the left is easier to interpret correctly because it is easier to trace the tops of the columns over to the vertical axis.


How is User Experience Design incorporated into Cambridge BioMarketing’s process and work?

UX & Art
Visual design decisions affect the end user experience
Research shows…
Font choices affect the user experience. They evoke different feelings in users.
The use of whitespace—placement and volume—affect readability.
Color, size, and placement of components all affect attention
Visual design decisions affect how much of a webpage appears above “the fold”
Visual Language
It’s important to have distinct visual treatments for text, for headers, and for links, so that the user can easily identify how components behave.. If these rules aren’t used consistently, they can cause confusion for the user, who won’t easily know what’s actionable and what’s not.
Information Design
Attractive interfaces are perceived as being easier to use than less attractive ones.
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing  Art

UX & Copy & Editorial
Copy affects the end user experience. It must be easily understood
The average American adult’s reading level is between the 8th and 9th grade
People read less on the web
Text in buttons, labels, and navigation
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Copy & Editorial

UX & Studio
Studio works on physical products (as does Art), and there is an experience associated with those
Prototyping for physical products
Studio and digital projects
When producing assets, file size impacts latency
Site speed is a factor that Google takes into account when determining which results to show when someone does a search
Photo composites tell compelling stories
Composites must seem real to convey information to visitors.
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Studio

UX & Dev
Development decisions affect the end user experience
Understand the platform & its limitations
Iterate on the interaction design by prototyping
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Dev

UX & Digital Producers
Plan the approach, scope, and estimate with the User Experience in mind
Enablers of the process who maintain a focus on UX throughout a project
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Digital Producers

UX & Account Services
Clients must understand the intended user experience, including the reasons behind our recommendations. Having buy-in from the clients can result in:
A better experience for their end users
Transcending the business goals
Redefining business goals by having discovery phases
A greater ROI: efficient, makes lives easier, increases user engagement
Not leaving money on the table
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Account Services

A wise man once said…
“Doing UX planning & IA right up front will result in fewer art cycles, fewer copy cycles, and fewer development cycles, so jobs get done on time and on budget.”
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Wisdom
– Mike DemopoulosDirector of Design/Technology at Cambridge BioMarketing

Who is responsible for the User Experience?
A user’s experience is impacted by all of our work, so it’s not just the responsibility of the User Experience Designer.
The User Experience is everyone’s responsibility.
UX at Cambridge BioMarketing Responsibility

What if I want to learn more?

References & Resources
Total Experience Design by Paul Dawson, http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/DS05
Our Misguided Focus on Brand and User Experience by Jon Kolko, http://johnnyholland.org/2009/12/01/our-misguided-focus-on-brand-and-user-experience-how-a-pursuit-of-a-%E2%80%9Ctotal-user-experience%E2%80%9D-has-derailed-the-creative-pursuits-of-the-fortune-500/
Our Philosophy by Google, http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
What defies defining, but exists everywhere? by Alice Rawsthorn, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/arts/18iht-DESIGN18.1.15327742.html
In Defense of Eye Candy by Stephen P. Anderson, http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy
Informing Our Intuition: Design Research for Radical Innovation by Jane Fulton Suri, http://www.ideo.com/publications/item/informing-our-intuition-design-research-for-radical-innovation/
Pfizer Principles for Clear Health Communication, http://www.pfizerhealthliteracy.com/pdf/PfizerPrinciples.pdf
Social Positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space by Rudström, Höök, and Martin Svensson, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67.1734&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The Psychologist’s View of UX Design by Susan Weinschenk, http://www.uxmag.com/design/the-psychologists-view-of-ux-design
Master User Experience Design by Craig Grannell, http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/discover-culture/master-user-experience-design
10 Most Common Misconceptions about User Experience Design by Whitney Hess, http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/
Experience, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience
Learn more…

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Elements of User Experience for Healthcare Programs

by Cambridge BioMarketing on Aug 13, 2010

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Elements of User Experience for Healthcare Programs — Presentation Transcript