MOMENT

In recent years, many new information tools have been introduced to improve the practice of medicine, but those very tools also have the potential to create challenging situations for clinical practice. Improving these healthcare tools is a complex, some would say wicked problem. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). EMRs are essential tools that physicians, hospitals, and health systems use to manage their patient’s medical information. Despite the long history of these applications, or perhaps because of it, EMRs are notorious for steep learning curves and challenging usability.

To further complicate matters, physicians who use these products have become quite adept at their interfaces; so, changes to the interface, no matter how much they improve the overall experience, often slow them down, costing them money in the process. As if that was not enough, there is the doctor-patient relationship that must remain intact, requiring physicians to put recordkeeping and ‘paperwork’ aside for later so that a they can devote their attention to their patients during their office hours. These challenges are problematic at best and, at worst, a threat to effective medical care.

Innovation in EMR systems must address these challenges, and at the Healthcare Experience Design Conference this past weekend, Jill Reed, User Experience Research Manager for Allscripts, shared her team’s work on their new EMR product, Allscripts, which provides a forward-thinking solution to these problems. What’s interesting to me about this project is how clearly it demonstrates the value of a holistic perspective on their customer’s experience. Because they took the time to better understand the real-life context of their customers, the solution they developed, a mobile companion product to their existing EMR systems, better fits into the physician’s physical and procedural workflows. Read More »

This is the second essay in a three-part series by John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflecting on his recent workshop, Ethnography for User Experience and their visit to Occupy Wall Street.

As I mentioned in part one  of this series, in November I led a workshop on Ethnography for User Experience for the New York Chapter of IxDA. My goal was to provide the attendees, a group of 25 interaction designers, some working principles of ethnography that they could adapt to their day-to-day design work; in essence, to help them shape a more “ethnograph-ish” approach to user experience design.

This map, published in the “Occupy Wall Street Journal” shows how the occupiers laid out their camp.

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This is the first essay in a multi-part series by John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflecting on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street.

I was recently asked by IxDA NY’s local leadership to lead a workshop on Ethnography for User Experience. Ethnography, as both a term and a discipline, is often misunderstood so I was happy to have the opportunity to give my perspective on it and on what it can contribute to User Experience Design.

Ethnography was formalized as a research approach in the social sciences, specifically within the discipline of anthropology, where it is commonly employed to describe human societies and cultures. In that setting, ethnography refers to a suite of qualitative research methodologies such as participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. as well as the interpretive output of that research. Read More »