The occasional light expression

The NYtimes reported the results of an interesting survey conducted with patients in North America at several top hospitals. The article notes that nationwide 67% patients mentioned they would recommend their institution to friends and relatives. It also notes….“Many patients reported that they had not been treated with courtesy and respect by doctors and nurses; that they had not received adequate pain medication after surgery; and that they did not understand the instructions they received when discharged from the hospital”. 

My personal hospital experiences always involve apprehension (what new papers do i need to fill out before the doctor condescends to see me), a bit of anger at how casually healthcare providers act (inured i’m sure by the sight of the dying day in and day out) and some relief when I leave the place - i almost find myself feeling  better when I leave a crowded, dark, dull hospital and feel the sun and wind on my face outside!

I’ve been coming across this ‘Healthcare experience’ discussion a lot lately. Last month as part of a workshop at IIT Kanpur we gave students the problem of redesigning  the healthcare system at the IIT through technology interventions (most groups came up with hybrid solutions - website and mobile SMS, mobiles and the IIT-wide intercom facility and such). One student group found through their discussions with staff and students at the healthcare center that patients felt doctors were ‘not touching us enough, not talking to us enough, not hearing us intently enough’. I also recall reading in Dan Pink’s Whole New Mind recently that several medical schools in North America have been teaching their students ‘empathy’, ’story telling’, ‘role playing’ and other such softer skills - which sounds like a good move.
I’m still skeptical though - will the medical profession ever embrace an open-source approach towards sharing medical knowledge and conducting treatments? Do they need to?

Yesterday on Mar 6 we finally managed to lift one foot off the ground and get the Bangalore User Experience and Design community closer through the first event of 2008 - a guest lecture by Murli on User Experience ecosystems, creativity, design thinking and innovation held at the Oracle Outer Ring Road office and supported by UPA Bangalore, CHI Bangalore, IxDA and various other individuals with a passion for user experience and innovation and that sort of thing.

Muthu’s just posted some pictures from the event on Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/bangaloreux/Mar06UXmeet/

If you were there, we would love to hear from you on what you thought and what kinds of things you’d like the community to keep working on further.

I am off to San Francisco tonight and will soon post my reflections from the event.

In mid February I traveled to IIT Kanpur with my colleague Adesh. We spent a good three days in the company of design students and faculty in the midst of the hustle bustle of ‘Techkriti’ - the annual IITK technical fest (read: a love fest for geeks and robo-heads) and the quaint (imagine peacocks walking outside your window) and picturesque IIT campus.

On Friday, we met some enthusiastic students and Prof. Satyaki Roy who was the brain behind this workshop idea - easily one of the most accessible, engaging, enthusiastic and savvy professors I’ve interacted with in a while. We had made up our minds that we would keep the workshop very engaging and hands on with minimal ‘Powerpoint gagging’ - however as I stood in front of those students and started my spiel on our past engagement and our plans for them and such, i had a moment of doubt on whether we’d be able to pull off an intensive Interaction Design workshop in all of two days.

Some say we did!

On Day 1, we started off the students on some basics of Interaction Design including user research and persona development. For the given design problem (Redesigning a healthcare system for the IIT Kanpur community on campus), the group conducted interviews with students, staff and faculty and went through the whole affinity diagramming process of sorting and synthesizing their interview findings. My big reminder/lesson from Day 1 was that user research is indeed a political process as much as it is a design process. We rounded off Day 1 with a requirements generation exercise.
On Day 2, we shifted gears and moved into Interaction design models, prototyping and usability evaluations. The students developed Interaction Design models to drive their requirements forward and subsequently worked with Powerpoint to visualize low fidelity prototypes. Dr. Roy was game enough to act as an archetypical ‘user’ during the usability testing session. My big reminder/lesson from Day 2 was that when you give students a free hand and let them work through figuring out a solution, they can come up with some pretty interesting ideas.

We ended Day 2 with each group giving brief ten min presentations to the workshop participants on their design rationale, process and final solution.

Alok Agashe, one of the workshop participants has posted the pictures from the workshop on Picasa

We left Kanpur on Sunday and were unfortunately too physically exhausted by the end of it all to try out Kanpur’s famous “Thaggu ke Laddoo” (The thug’s sweets). However, i found myself intellectually very charged up and inspired at the end of that weekend - I hope to be back in IIT Kanpur soon enough. There is something about good university campuses which is so different from air conditioned corporate existences. Edward Said, in one of his books fondly remembered his days at Columbia University as some of the best in his life.
I am hoping to conduct similar workshops within the Bangalore UX and Design community as well.

These past two Friday afternoons, I’ve been visiting the National Institute of Design (NID)’s Bangalore campus for providing industry inputs and teaching a class on ‘Prototyping and Usability’ to students of the Masters in Design program.

Over the next few weeks in January/February, I will be covering (with Adesh, a brilliant and enthusiastic Senior Interaction Designer from my team) the following topics through a mix of presentations, case studies, examples and hands on activities.
- How prototyping drives design and innovation
- Overview of prototyping, fidelity and tool selection
- Fundamentals of low, mid and high fidelity prototyping
- Group and individual exercises on different prototyping techniques
- Usability evaluations: Methods, metrics and protocols

All the students are in their second semester and are taking other classes in User Experience Design including on web design, usability studies, Interaction design and user research.
I’m quite excited about how the next few sessions turn out. Its always energizing to be in the presence of students - keeps me on my toes too.

I’m also looking forward to my visit to IIT Kanpur’s design program in mid February for a design workshop we’ll be conducting over the weekend of Feb 15.

I recently caught an iTunes video of Jonathan Harris’s work including the fascinating ‘We Feel Fine‘, ‘Yahoo Time Capsule‘ and ‘Universe’ projects.

Harris’s work reminded me of an old (paraphrased here) Terence Mckenna quote “If aliens were to look down upon Earth from their ships, they would not see biology the way we see it - they would see the evolution of a gene swarm of concepts and ideas and language using human biology as the reduction valve”.
Harris’s work describes a new mythology - the mythology of the post modern relativistic age of the 21st century. For every kingdom, merchant mafias, gate keeper and courtesan of the ancient age, there is a corporate monopoly, Private Equity cult, legal counsel, and minor celebrity surviving through their 15 minutes of infamy. Harris’s Universe is not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of the bubbling cauldron of thoughts, events, concepts, and meta-verses.

I am getting to be a big fan of Slideshare - the online service which allows you to upload, share, tag, and download Powerpoint presentations using a very fast, engaging and usable interface.

What particularly excites me about the Slideshare interface is that it allows me to do very rapid, hyperlinked, keyword based trend analysis and learning - concepts and patterns and connections and trends form rapidly in my head.

In the desktop Powerpoint experience, I find my attention wandering because the plain Powerpoint UI backdrop doesn’t quite engage me - and the full screen Powerpoint is too attention demanding - you can only focus on it and nothing else on the desktop.
On the contrary, with Slideshare, I find my attention to be comfortably divided between the presentation at hand and the surrounding UI. I think the presentation mode is very compelling and fast, and it also seems to bring out the best in the authors of these presentations.

Perhaps, after years of seeing drab, soulless, templatized, over-worded corporate Powerpoints, most of the authors of good presentations on Slideshare have used this new medium to express their creativity. Also the community does a good job of generating interesting tags for the Powerpoint, which means that while viewing a certain presentation, you always have a nice ambient view of related presentations — always a boon for a hyperlinked-learning junkie like me.
Kudos to Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle and their team on their continue brilliance and design touches within Slideshare.

I’m reporting this live from the UPA China conference at the Jiuhua resort in Beijing.

Thyra Rauch, the UPA International President just finished a short and inspiring talk on UPA, on the evolution of UPA in China, and how in the experience economy, the user experience professionals in China have an opportunity to not only grow in their respective Interaction Design and usability areas, but also be responsible for new product innovations and new market innovations.

Jason Huang, the UPA China President is now giving an overview of UPA China and how they got to where they are (to become the fastest growing UPA chapter worldwide). He described how it started as a volunteer group and eventually began working as a non-profit, while dealing with the financial and operational challenges of a company.

He shared some personal anecdotes about his core UPA China team and how his team worked extra hours to be able to put User Friendly 2007 together. Jason them emphasized that this year’s theme is more around innovation, and that in innovating for China UPA China can be a catalyst for China’s creative industry. He presented lots of charts and details on the demographics of the UX industry in China (still a strong bent towards Hong Kong), on the undergraduate programs in UX and HCI, average ages, training realities and requirements on the ground for Chinese UX professionals, average salaries and such.

It seems the average salaries are highest in Shanghai (82000 RMB) and then Beijing (70000 RMB) and are lower than 70000 RMB in other cities. 220000 RMB was quoted as a very high salary number for a Shanghai based practitioner. It appears that 70% practitioners do not think they are paid well (is that a global trend or what!).

Jason then presented some other details on how many companies have usability labs, what the levels of UCD embedding are within the software development process and such.

He ended with an overview of presentations for the day and some design competitions for students.

Yesterday on my way home I got a call from a certain car dealership company in Bangalore from where I’d purchased my first car. After some small talk on how the car was doing and such, the lady rep on the phone got to the point. Here is how the conversation went:

Rep: Sir, did you receive a customer feedback form from our Delhi office

me: Umm, No

Rep: Sir, when you do could you make sure you rate us 8 out of 10

me: What?

Rep: Sir, the ratings of the Delhi office are really important for us. If you rate us less than 8 it will reflect bad customer service

Me: Umm, O…K, but what if i got bad customer service (which i havent, but what if)

Rep: No problem Sir, you rate us over 8 and come to the showroom - we will fix whatever problem you’ve had with us

Me: Right…ok

At that point the rep hung the phone leaving me puzzled if i were living in some strange Orwellian fantasy world for those 2 minutes!

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

Jared Spool’s article “Surviving our success: 3 radical recommendations” in last month’s Journal of Usability Studies is a nice quick read.

He proposes 3 recommendations to deal with a common problem (backed by studies such as by Rolf Molich) that CEOs point to — UE findings by supposed experts can be very variable depending on who conducts the evaluations.

Among usability studies conducted by dozens of ‘credible’ teams across the world, Molich found that usability studies on everyday products such as Hotmail and the Flash based Hotel Penn website (which is a favorite hiring ‘test’ for some firms) had a lot of variation in what experts thought of as ‘catastrophic’ issues. Very few of the teams that conducted the usability studies had similarities on what they thought were P1 issues.

Here are Spool’s 3 radical recommendations – perhaps worth a thought:

1.    Stop Making Recommendations
2.    Stop conducting evaluations
3.    Seek out new techniques

Read the paper to see the details on these recommendations – they’re not as controversial as they appear!