Interview with Peter Jones, Part I

Peter Jones‘s new book, Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience, is on sale now! Use discount code RMBLOG for 20% off the original price in our store.

We sat down with Peter to ask him a few questions about healthcare and the design process. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: What’s the book about in a nutshell?

Peter Jones: Design for Care is the book I would have wanted when starting in this area almost 10 years ago. It deals with the complex intersection between healthcare and the services of design. The book leans heavily toward what designers need to know about healthcare, which is the harder to learn stuff than design method. So I focus on three major design approaches. I deal with information use but not so much informatics, which has its own deep literature. My approach to service design is a “care systems” approach, which is needed in clinical practice design. And I focus on system design of care organizations and processes (healthcare institutions are called that for a reason, they are very structured).

I designed it as a guidebook for design professionals to navigate across the conflicting and confusing perspectives, methods, and current issues in healthcare services. While it’s not truly comprehensive—health is a huge field&#8212it covers more ground than any prior book. The other audience is healthcare professionals. They have to learn about the practices, tools, and validity of design and design research before they will fully sponsor and work with us as members of the care team. So I’ve sacrificed emerging technology and more risky design practices to focus more on fundamental cases to which I had direct access. There’s a lot of creativity in the design research methods, where I’ve selected some unique but highly validated tools for sharing with these audiences.

Are you advocating a design process for healthcare, or is there a different meaning to care?

PJ: The book is not a single design process, it’s a series of frames that fit each of the sectors I chose. Each frame has an application, a bit of theory and a central case study I selected three broad sectors—consumer, clinical practice, and institutional – and these have their own slices that follow a patient’s journey through the system.

Technology, as many believe, does not “drive” healthcare practice. At the very heart of things, “care” drives healthcare, and that’s the ultimate focus of design work. Making sure care happens, to serve patients, families, communities and the caregivers. Healthcare is a human system all the way through, full of the heroics and messiness of taking care of people. In my view, the humanity of practice explains why the field seems so far behind. Doctors, nurses, staff, everyone on the front lines are working directly with and on patients and their stakeholders. Technology can always be worked around, mediated, fixed over time. Nobody ever held up care because an EMR wasn’t working right. So the “user demand” for design excellence is not a big driver, yet. Better usability, information workflow, and service flow will save lives—but it’s not an immediate save. Care delivery comes first.

RM: Where is the “Care” in Design for Care?

PJ: I found that every one of my stories and chapters had a different take on the meaning of care in its context. In a technical sense, it means the delivery of clinical services by professionals treating a patient’s health concerns. In a social sense, care is the meaning of human concern for another’s well being. In the design sense, I see our purpose essentially in helping caregivers innovate. Helping care happen, designing for the experience of the one being cared for. To me that not only includes what we call patient experience, it means whole families and communities and circles of care. And to a great extent that means making the work of caregiving and care practice more humane, safe and engaging. Clinicians to a great job of care while coping with constant workarounds. Rather than just fixing the sources of problems (such as wait times), the big design contribution will be to lead innovation for new integrations of technology and workflow practices.

With the strong practices of empathic design now, I think design practice has a stake in this practice. But to earn our rights, design must practice in the field, practitioners should be dedicated to healthcare as other care professionals are. Otherwise we’ll just be hired guns creating efficiencies.

Our society and institutors are very ambivalent about actual caring. We give lip service to “being caring” but its not a strong North American value. Consider that most caregivers—family members&#8212are not socially valued, are never paid. Yes, doctors are among the highest paid professionals, but it’s due to risk and technical proficiency, not care. The real clinical carers are nurses, and they have always fought for equality. There’s been a turn in social philosophy recently that should help make a case for designing as care professionals. Riane Eisler writes about the caring economy in the Real Wealth of Nations, and advocates a paradigm shift toward a “caring economics” that treasures the real value of human relationships, communities and national well-being. In the book I cite Milton Mayeroff whose view is both simple and profound, where care is a strongly local, felt understanding that actively seeks to help another person grow. I believe designers can fulfill that role with others in “care delivery” and health services. We can help others to grow and if not always help the healing process, we can design better artifacts, systems and places that provide care safely, attentively, and universally. We need to be working with clinical teams and “caring providers,” but yes, designers can help bring the inherent care values in healthcare to the center, making them understood, within our services and clinics.

RM: Thanks, Peter!

Stay tuned for Part II of Peter’s interview next week! Pick up a copy of his new book, Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience, and use discount code RMBLOG for 20% off!

A short interview with Whitney Quesenbery and 50% off her book today only!

Wacky Wednesdays are here for the Summer! This week we’re featuring Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks.

We had a quick chat with Whitney about personas and easy mistakes to avoid in storytelling. Read on for more and use the discount code WACKY to get 50% off ebook versions of Storytelling! This sale only lasts until 11:59pm ET tonight!

Rosenfeld Media: How do personas improve the user experience of a product?

Whitney Quesenbery: For all the time in a project when you are not working directly with real users, personas stand in for them. They express what you know about the audience and keep those real users in mind as you make the thousands of decisions (large and small) that go into a new product.

Personas include a lot of data about demographics, behavior, and opinion. But what personas do better than a lot of charts and graphs is communicate imagery, emotions, context, and motivation. They help you remember the stories you heard, and let you tell new stories that explore how the personas will react to your new ideas.

RM: What’s a common mistake people make when it comes to personas and storytelling?

WQ: Not using them effectively. Too often, UX teams go to a lot of work to create personas, and then do little or nothing to put them to work. They make a few posters, run a presentation, and then put them aside.

Personas should be part of your product team. They are the way you continue to think about the audience and bring the UX research into the design process. Everyone on the team should know them by name, and be able to think about what each persona needs, wants, dislikes. This means that they need to get to know the personas properly—have a chance to ask them questions, learn what makes them crazy about the way things are now, and hear what new ideas will make them excited. Can you look at a sketch or prototype and have a good idea what they will do first and how they will react?

Two dangers to watch out for:

1. Do all the personas start to sound the same? If they don’t represent different perspectives, attitudes, or contexts, then they don’t let you explore all the ways real people will experience your product.
2. Do stories about the persona end too easily? Do they jump right from a problem to fully embracing your new app? Maybe you are telling stories for the users you hope to have, instead of the ones that are really out there.

RM: Thanks, Whitney!

Wacky Wednesdays Are Back!

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So You Want to Write a UX Book

We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think UX was a dynamic field, with enough subject matter to fill many books. Maybe you want to write one of those books yourself, but you’re daunted by the prospect. Understandable; a book is a formidable undertaking, especially on top of a full-time job, family, and other obligations. It also might just be the best thing you’ve ever done. Ready to take the leap? Some veteran RM authors offer tips that may help see you through the process and bring your book to its your ship date.

Write something every day (or nearly)

And keep track of your progress. While writing UX Team of One, Leah Buley jotted down each day’s work onto a big flip-chart calendar she kept in the kitchen. “I could look back and see when there were big chunks of time when I’d been writing diligently or when I’d simply been writing nothing. Each was motivating in its own way.” Sometimes she wrote on her CalTrain commute, happy to arrive at the office with the day’s writing already done.

Daily writing ignites momentum, and that, says Kevin Cheng, is “the only thing that matters.” Dabbling once a week, “it takes hours to get back into the swing,” says Cheng, author of See What I Mean. “When I started working daily, I could find myself with ten minutes before a bus came and still make noticeable progress, because the entire book’s status was in my head.” Once he got into a regular groove, the “runner’s high” kicked in and made it easier to keep going.

Cloister yourself

To throw down on Why We Fail, Victor Lombardi spent a week in a beach house off-season. “That allowed me to escape all other home and work distractions, and to research and write three chapters in that time,” he says.

Cloistering also was huge for Cheng. He finished his first draft in a cabin in the redwood forests of northern California, where he stowed away his phone and disabled all time-telling devices so he wouldn’t watch the clock. “I found that I was able to enter flow almost immediately,” he wrote in a blog post about the experience. “I got a lot more done in a shorter period of time than I normally would have.”

Don’t cloister yourself

What’s that? You don’t have the time or wherewithal to hunker down in a remote cabin? Not to worry; plenty of RM authors penned their books in crowded, noisy environs. Andy Polaine, who lives in Germany, worked on Service Design on long train journeys to and from Switzerland. “Personally, I work better in crowded spaces—trains, cafés—than I do in silence,” he says. “In solitary silence, every tiny thing is a distraction. In crowded places, my writing is the distraction.”

While cloistering may work for the heavy lifting of a first draft or cranking out copy for a deadline, Peter Jones finds it too confining for reviewing and revising. “A secluded office can lead to over-focus, making me hypercritical, and I end up wordsmithing meaning to death.” But he cautions, “Be careful following my advice; Design for Care took forever to write.”

Make It So co-author Nathan Shedroff finds cloistering helpful for certain tasks of book production, such as sorting research material, creating outlines, and indexing. But at other phases, solitude is counterproductive. “I find that writing is, at times, so confounding that being cloistered actually makes me less focused and more of a procrastinator,” he says.

If you’re collaborating with others, of course, some human contact will be necessary. The authors of Service Design—Polaine, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Løvlie—live in three different countries. Skype, Basecamp, Dropbox, and other tools helped immensely, but about halfway through, says Polaine, “we really needed a couple of days in a room together to nail the re-structuring. There’s nothing like having stuff pinned up on the wall.”

You won’t get everything in

You have a ton of material, yet UX changes all the time. How do you cover everything in such a way that it won’t be old news by the time the book’s published?

You probably can’t. Accepting that fact helped Sara Wachter-Boettcher move forward with Content Everywhere. “If I stick to a limited scope and do it well, my book will inspire further books and articles that tackle the topics I didn’t get to, or that dive deep into something I barely skimmed,” she says. “Getting stuck on the idea that you have to be exhaustive about your topic is a failing proposition: You will never finish that way.” If it just kills you to leave out certain stuff, well, blogs are lovely for that sort of thing, aren’t they?

Go analog

Ditching the laptop and writing on paper helped Buley drop “a work-y/email-y voice” and tap into “a different voice that was more intimate and conversational, which is the voice that I really want to share with readers.” She wrote her entire book on paper, then used dictation software to get it into digital form. “Probably not the most efficient method in the world, but it worked for me.”

Avail yourself of others.

Make It So co-author Chris Noessel says presenting material at conferences while he and Shedroff were writing the book “put pressure on us to find out what works, what doesn’t work, and get suggestions on improvements.” Other authors echoed this sentiment. Don’t be afraid to ask for input, they say; most people will be glad to offer some.

But before anything, you gotta produce some words. Other people can help with this too. Joining a “Shut Up and Write” meetup in San Francisco helped Aga Bojko plow ahead on Eye Tracking the User Experience. Her favorite sessions are weekend marathons held in a coffee shop, during which members write for ninety-minute sprints—no talking, no phones—broken up by thirty-minute breaks for eating, drinking, and socializing. People in her group work on everything from screenplays to poetry to dissertations. “The main idea is to get together and, thanks to peer pressure and encouragement, get a lot done,” says Bojko. “And we do get a lot done!”

A support system of trusted friends or colleagues, says Wachter-Boettcher, can help battle “the soul-sucking beast” of impostor syndrome: I’m not smart enough to do this. Everyone will laugh at this. “These are normal feelings but remember that they don’t reflect reality,” she says. And don’t be shy about drawing the line on outside input. Says Noessel: “Instruct your friends to not ask how the book is going. It’s the polite thing to do.”

And some other stuff.

Shedroff: “Take long flights and don’t watch the movie.”

Cheng: “Sometimes, momentum can be lost on the other end (after the book is finished) because the editors or other support people are busy with their schedules or other books. It’s as much up to you to keep the momentum going and not let that be an excuse for you to go, ‘Well, I haven’t heard from them. …”

Noessel: “It will take longer than you think.” “You have to build authority in the text, not presume it.” “The book will (should?) change the way you think. This is awesome.”

Buley: “Some people have what they want to say in their head at the beginning, and some people figure out what they want to say through the process of writing. I’m in the second camp. Once I realized that … I didn’t feel so bogged down by imposter syndrome or the slow guilties.” Also: “Get pregnant! A due date makes for a very formidable deadline.”

Wachter-Boettcher: “Write your heart out, do your damnedest, and be rigorous. But don’t drag your feet. After all, anyone can write. Authors ship.”