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Call us crazy, but we suspect that there is a growing demand for UX workshops to be taught in-house inside large organizations. We’re exploring connecting our authors and other UX experts with that demand—assuming it’s real.

Would you help us find out? To learn more, we’ve created a really short survey—no required questions—that will take you perhaps a minute to complete. Do so no later than July 7 and you’ll be eligible to win one of five free Rosenfeld Media books.

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QuickPanel: Disaster Relief

Natural disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan, which last month devastated much of the Philippines, bring immense information challenges, from reports and warnings issued beforehand to the web sites that handle donations afterward.  How does UX factor into disaster preparedness and response?  We asked a panel of experts to weigh in.  

How have web and mobile technology changed the donation process for example, the ability to text donations?  Have non-profits such as Kickstarter, Indigogo, and Crowdtilt raised the bar for easy experiences?

Lisa Welchman:  I believe these sorts of organizations have improved the experience for donation, but they’ve also crowded the field, which makes it hard for donors to determine the nature and status of the organizations doing the fundraising. We all want to be sure that we are donating to an organization that will make most effective use of our funds. On the positive side, newer donation methods make it easier for an individual to target their donation either to a specific geographic region or to fill a particular gap in infrastructure, such as housing or food supply.  And, the ease of donation can also put demands on the physical supply chain.

Non-profits should take care to understand the full process, from making the quick donation all the way to the goods or monetary instruments reaching those who need them.  Kiva loans are powerful, for instance, because there is a direct connection between the one supplying the loan and the one receiving it. That connection, and reporting back on the use of the loan, helps give the donor the confidence that they are really making a difference.

Kelly Goto: When Katrina hit in 2005, I donated using Red Cross because I had heard it was the best way to ensure your money was going to the right places at the right time. Later, I donated to my local church, which was very well connected to local churches in the hurricane-hit area.  That seemed even more direct and helpful but a fluke because it was based on a personal relationship. Today, there are sites that help you vett who to donate to, and the ability to send $10 via SMS is compelling and very friction-free. The “crowdsourced” assurance that your funds are going in the right direction works on that local community-based level, which feels the most impactful.

There was some debate over Kiva in the last few years, where you were not assured that the micro loans were being handled properly, and the information on the web site was not 100 percent clear or accurate. Local/community-based services such as Task Rabbit and AirBnB help jumpstart activity on a local level while assuring systems of privacy and protection are in place. The same local-based mentality of helping someone you know or a project you respect via Kickstarter, or joining a smaller cause where you can see the effect directly, does seem to have more emotional resonance, and thus a bigger impact for smaller funds. Not only is the experience friction-free, but the meaning is there, thus the desire to join in and believe you can make an impact.

Whitney Quesenbery:  The ability to text a small donation, charged to your phone, is an amazingly successful way to allow people to act on their natural, human impulse to help out in a crisis.  Ushahidi and similar SMS-based systems let everyone not only have access to information, but contribute information as well.

We see this sort of bottom-up information system in our daily commute. Drivers’ reports of accidents or traffic jams are reported on maps and even in radio traffic updates. And the data from navigation systems supports real-time predictions of travel time.

Mobile money is also having a profound effect on humanitarian aid. Getting supplies into the affected area is important, but this article in User Experience describes how relief agencies are using mobile money so that families can make their own decisions about what they need and have the resources to get it.  The author, Gabrielle Smith, writes, “There has been overwhelming evidence from many humanitarian relief efforts around the world, that cash transfers give people more dignity and flexibility in meeting their day-to-day needs.” Isn’t that a goal worth designing for?

Is there anything we can take away from Haiyan to be applied to future catastrophes?

Kelly Goto:  There was a disconnect of language and communication on a very straightforward level that really hit me. The term “storm surge” rather than “tsunami” was used and unheeded by so many. No one knew what a storm surge was but everyone knew what a tsunami was. If the government and news had used “tsunami”, I heard 80 percent more people would have evacuated, even if the term wasn’t 100 percent correct.  (A tsunami is a wave or series of waves caused by an earthquake in the ocean that come in as rapid surges. A storm surge is caused by a hurricane, typhoon or cyclone. They are wind-driven, generally come in more slowly, and are easier to predict.)

How we handle these warnings and respond now, as well as take lessons away for the future, is a “life cycle” of great magnitude. Kind of like two friends of mine who have PhDs in social welfare, but one’s on the hands-on side of social work and the other on the policy/plan-for-the-future side.  It takes both disciplines to make change happen, over time, while dealing with the crisis on the ground.

I could not help but think about an amazing lecture I heard by Ravi Sawheny of RKS Design on the methodology used to design the Hydropack technology—I was mesmerized to see similar frameworks we use in user research to help companies like Samsung “innovate” while RKS was using their focus to change the world.

I would like to see a brain trust (not just a think tank) of donated time from smart individuals and teams dedicated to solving more of these types of problems. As someone who lives along a tsunami warning-labeled coastline, it does hit home.

Lisa Welchman: A storm surge is a storm surge and a tsunami is a tsunami. I think accuracy is important. If people don’t know the difference, then the focus should be on educating them so that they do. Perhaps we need to stop talking about catastrophes using meteorologically focused, sound-bite naming conventions and start quantifying and talking about them in terms of the catastrophe’s impact on a number of different factors—things like loss of home, loss of life, loss of services. We do some of that already, but it would be interesting to create a scale using those factors. Folks could then be socialized into the new measurement paradigm. Storms are interesting, but what drives me to donate is their impact.

I was mesmerized to see similar frameworks we use in user research to help companies like Samsung “innovate” while RKS was using their focus to change the world.

Whitney Quesenbery:  Words and definitions are important, but it’s more important that people understand not only what they mean but what actions they should take.

That fits the definition of plain language (from Ginny Redish and international plain language organizations, including the Center for Plain Language) that clear communication means that people can

•    Find what they need
•    Understand what they find
•    Act on the information

During Hurricane Sandy, my town didn’t have flooding, but our power was out for ten days. The county used the emergency-response phone systems, and neighbors went door-to-door to get out the word about both the situation and what help was available.

There was a disconnect of language and communication on a very straightforward level that really hit me.

Maybe one lesson to take away is that when information is as important as life and death, we need many different ways to communicate it: flags, sirens, phone, web, social media, person-to-person, etc.

Information after a crisis can be just as critical as clean water and medical supplies.  What can UX professionals offer in this regard?

Whitney Quesenbery: I’m working on a project with the U.S. Health and Human Services emergency response planners to create tools to help them understand and manage a crisis.

There are very few UX folks inside these sorts of organizations and it shows.

As we talked to people at federal headquarters and in the regions, I was struck by their need for a big picture and a way to find and manage details—at the same time. This is just the sort of wicked problem where good UX can make a huge difference.

There is a chain of connections between national policy (How many medical response units do we deploy? What equipment and supplies do they need?) and first responders on the scene. It crosses time and geography, but also levels of government, NGOs, and citizen response. If they cannot communicate clearly in rapidly evolving events, they cannot respond well, let alone get ahead of the crisis to respond effectively.

As a UX person, there is not much I can tell dedicated professionals about their job. What I can do, however, is listen carefully to what they want and use my UX skills to shape tools that are even better than what they imagined.

One of our tools is an online “All-Hazards Plan” that uses a visualization as the main entry point. Someone at the operations center can look across different response “functional areas” to see what teams have action steps now, at any stage of the event from preparedness, through the event, and into recovery. That sort of overview is critical for good coordination. We workshopped a dozen different design ideas to find the one that worked for them.

Kelly Goto: There is a before, during and after. I think UX can be best incorporated in the “before,” much like how policy works on the welfare side. It’s not that I would choose not to address the “during” or “after”; however in our field, we can provide charts, graphics and help people visualize the situation and provide better insight on how they might react and respond.

Storms are interesting, but what drives me to donate is their impact.

I live in a coastal area of California. We have signs for tsunamis with arrows on where to go and what to do, along with a calling system for people who have regular phone lines in the area, and a local SMS system for all local alerts (traffic, emergencies, missing persons, etc.) I am signed up for these services and have seen how they work.  However, the truth is no one thinks a tsunami will actually occur, and I doubt the preparation for a real disaster is even present.

There seems to be “hurricane fatigue” in areas that are the hardest hit, so even when the danger is the most prominent and the awareness is present, people are still not aware of how impactful a natural disaster can be. Awareness at multiple levels—from individual to family to the community to local government—should include visual output and localized communications (both analog and digital). And this should also include the “what to do in the aftermath” should power and communications go dark—for example, people most often stress about their pets—and how to handle safety. Perhaps RFID tags and other devices can be also established?

Lisa Welchman:  I’m actively working with NGOs and other governmental organizations about their ability to deliver accurate information in a crisis. Much of the impetus for addressing this came from information management problems that have arisen during some recent natural disasters. How organizations determine what they say and don’t say to people in a crisis, and when they say it, is interesting—and not as organized as it could be.

This is just the sort of wicked problem where good UX can make a huge difference.

It might be interesting to explore how often the right information gets to the right person at the right time in a catastrophe and to understand what the limits are for certain channels, not just for those impacted by the catastrophe but for those trying to help others.  Catastrophes are by their nature confusing but that could be improved by more thoughtful information flow. A lot of that flow is based on legacy paper-based processes; changing that requires creative thought from people who understand the capabilities of new digital channels as well as the mission-critical agenda of governments and NGOs. There are very few UX folks inside these sorts of organizations and it shows.

Like what our experts had to say? Guess what: you can have them bring their brains to you. Kelly Goto, Whitney Quesenbery, and Lisa Welchman are available for consulting and training through Rosenfeld Media.

5 Resources for implementing AI into your UX design process

If you’ve been online in the last couple of years, you’ve seen the recent boom of artificial intelligence (AI) across industries. Chat-GPT and Midjourney are practically household names. Whether you’re an enthusiast or a skeptic, it’s clear that artificial intelligence is becoming more commonplace. Caution with new technology is crucial, but adding AI to certain projects can lead to promising results. A few key benefits of using AI in user experience (UX) design include automating repetitive tasks, reducing user error, assisting with content generation, and more. With the right care, AI can be a helpful resource for UXers.

So, how do we implement AI into UX workflows?

In this post, we’ll cover a few ways to do just that by highlighting some up-and-coming products and resources you can add to your UX/AI arsenal.

Get an assist with your UX writing

First, it’s crucial to start small when implementing something new like artificial intelligence into your workflow. Test AI tools on a limited scale first, and see what kind of impact it makes. One simple yet effective step to begin implementing artificial intelligence into your process is through content generation and creation. Writer’s block affects us all, and staring at a blank page can be daunting, but with the help of AI, the words can keep flowing!

Frontitude, a leading platform for managing UX content, has just the tool to help you maximize your UX writing prowess. Frontitude’s UX Writing Assistant streamlines the UX writing process and empowers design teams to create exceptional user experiences. Make your writing more consistent and efficient through the UX Writing Assistant’s generated suggestions—tailored for your specific context. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, the UX Writing Assistant suggests content based on industry standards, product details, target audience, and more. Plus, it integrates with Figma, ensuring a smooth and efficient workflow. By keeping the content creation process within the design ecosystem, teams can maintain focus and maximize productivity.

As an individual, this product is free to use! For teams, there are different tiers for editor seats within the UX Writing Assistant—starting at $10/seat/month—as well as additional guidelines, integrations, and more. Contact Frontitude for more pricing information.

By incorporating Frontitude’s UX Writing Assistant into your UX process, you can unlock new levels of efficiency, consistency, and user-centricity.

Power your prototyping with AI

What is UX without a prototype? This critical step in the UX design process allows designers to iterate their ideas and gather feedback. However, traditional prototyping methods can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, often slowing down the overall design workflow.

Uizard addresses this challenge by leveraging AI to automate and accelerate the prototyping process. With Uizard’s text-to-UI generator, you can bring ideas to life in minutes. With just a few prompts or sketches, the platform’s AI can generate user interfaces, visual assets, and more! This tool not only saves time but also sparks creativity by providing inspiration for new design directions to explore.

Starting for free with unlimited viewers, 2 projects, and 10 free templates, Uizard has three tiers. Pro contains everything in free but with unlimited projects and templates for $12/month (billed yearly). Businesses can opt for the $49/creator/month option to get everything in Pro but with priority support.

Whether you’re a seasoned designer or just starting, Uizard’s AI-driven prototyping tools offer a powerful and intuitive solution to streamline your workflow.

Use AI to generate insights from user research

Another way to implement AI into your user experience research practice is through an AI research assistant. Miro, a leading online whiteboard platform, has introduced a feature called Miro Assist, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to streamline the UX design process and enhance team collaboration. Miro Assist uses the information already in your existing Miro board to generate insights, analyses, task lists, summaries, and more.

By analyzing your existing designs and wireframes, the AI can offer suggestions for improvements, identify potential usability issues, and recommend best practices based on industry standards and design principles. This collaborative approach empowers UX designers to make informed decisions and refine their designs iteratively, ensuring a user-centric approach throughout the process. Miro Assist is designed to learn and improve continuously based on user interactions and feedback. As designers utilize the AI-powered features, the system adapts and refines its suggestions, ensuring that the assistance provided becomes increasingly relevant and valuable over time. This continuous learning capability ensures that Miro Assist remains a valuable asset in the ever-evolving UX design landscape. Miro Assist’s pricing is calculated per team member. See here for more information.

Let AI analyze your user interviews

User experience wouldn’t exist without the subject: the user. By conducting interviews, user researchers gain valuable insights into behaviors, pain points, and preferences, all of which influence the creation of intuitive and user-centric products. Yet, transcribing and analyzing these interviews is often tedious, taking up time that could be better spent on other efforts. Enter Fireflies.ai.

Fireflies.ai is an intelligent note-taking tool for transcribing and capturing notes from user interviews. With advanced speech recognition technology, this program ensures accurate and reliable transcriptions, lightening the load of researchers where it is much needed. Instead of capturing every detail, researchers can focus their attention on the interview at hand, actively listening and engaging with the user. Once transcribed, Fireflies.ai uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to identify key themes, sentiments, and patterns. UXers can quickly search for pain points or other feedback and transform this information into actionable insights. Plus, Fireflies.ai integrates with Figma, Miro, and Slack for a seamless workflow.

Get educated on the potentials and pitfalls of AI

Artificial intelligence-powered products in the UX field are becoming more and more common, but what if you want to see a real-life example of how AI has been implemented into UX? See the practical applications and ethical considerations of AI in UX at Designing with AI 2024, a virtual conference taking place June 4-5, with optional virtual workshops scheduled for the following weeks. Learn from case studies like this one about AI-assisted documentation in healthcare, demos about streamlining the user research process with AI, and end-of-day panels that dissect the ethical ramifications of each day’s talks. Plus, be inspired by our keynote speakers Dan Hill, author of Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, and Jodi Forlizzi, Herbert A. Simon Professor of HCI, Carnegie Mellon University.

There is immense potential in the integration of artificial intelligence into UX design processes. By leveraging AI-powered tools like Frontitude’s UX Writing Assistant, Uizard’s prototyping platform, Miro Assist, and Fireflies.ai, UXers can streamline their workflows and generate new insights. However, it’s crucial to approach the subject of AI with its impact on the design process and the end-user experience in mind. By staying informed through resources like the Designing with AI 2024 conference, UX professionals can navigate the opportunities and challenges of AI integration, ultimately harnessing its power to create exceptional, user-centric products that truly resonate with their target audiences.

QuickPanel: Drones, Amazon and Other

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, the man knows how to touch off a media storm.  Which is precisely what ensued after Bezos told 60 Minutes that Amazon is testing the use of drones to deliver goods.  Immediately, everyone was discussing the prospect of ordering a box of tissues from Amazon and having a drone arrive at your doorstep in half an hour.  We’ve asked some Rosenfeld Media experts to join the fray on this audacious idea.

Are drones the next logical step for a service culture that demands ever more instant gratification?

Victor Lombardi:  Amazon knows that any commercial use of drones lies far off in the logistical future. Kevin Roose argues that Amazon is therefore dabbling in some sort of pre-lobbying of the government, but I prefer David Steitfeld’s wider view that Jeff Bezos spun a tale of drones as a masterful use of public relations, mostly to counter negative criticism.

But even this interpretation fails to grasp the power of Amazon’s imagination, the company that started by selling books, grew into a marketplace for anything, and then offered its own cloud computing platform for sale. Clearly, they aspire to more than mere retail. But they know for us to take them seriously they must put forth an image of themselves as something more, something special.

Don Norman calls this reflective design, which goes beyond our senses and perception of usability to influence our understanding of who the company is and who we become when we patronize it. In my book I discuss how Apple publicized the iPod. It didn’t emphasize how pretty the device was or how great the features were; Apple showed us how we would feel using the device. I think Amazon is doing something similar: inspiring us, getting us to think differently about who Amazon is and what we think about ourselves when we shop there. Before, I shopped at Amazon to save money and time. Now, I’m affiliating myself with this cool company that thinks about drones and how awesome their customer service can become. Now when I shop there, I’m cooler, too. Thanks Jeff.

Nate Bolt: I don’t think there’s any inevitable progression towards autonomous quadcopters playing a role in our service culture. But drones are absolutely fascinating. We’ve been largely introduced to sophisticated drones as killing machines. That’s been our biggest cultural exposure up to this point, aside from all the other small-use cases we see. Most of us understand that drones themselves can offer all sorts of functionality that wasn’t possible even a few years ago. If there’s any logical progression happening, it’s simply military technology always disseminating out to the rest of us. I do think many of us in the tech world will continue to experiment with drones, because flying and autonomy cut so close to the dreams of every nerd. [Editor’s note:  Nate once flew a drone around the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library.]  It sparks the imagination to think of all the issues in the physical world–search and rescue, agriculture, photography–that can be improved by drones.

Every time I hear people worry that a new way of doing something is going to fundamentally change society or destroy civilization, I remember that these same concerns were raised about the printing press, the train, the personal computer, the Internet, and the waltz.

At the very least it was a brilliant marketing effort for Amazon. Taco drone, pizza drone, France post office drone–it’s really all been marketing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon kills this program internally when it stops keeping their name in our conversations. I generally like it when large companies pursue things just because they are cool, but it’s usually driven by marketing. The product designers and engineers at Amazon and other large companies don’t have quite as much leeway to simply investigate technology they think might be cool in five or ten years. But I wish they did.

Laura Klein: I don’t think they’re the next logical step. They are a possible step, but I think that a much more logical next step would be same-day delivery by humans (which is already being done in some areas) or even self-driving cars. Amazon picked drones as the announcement because drones are a thing that everybody is talking about right now. They get a lot more press from talking about drones then they would from slightly improving their supply chain to roll out same-day delivery to a few major metropolitan areas.

The phrase “a service culture that demands ever more instant gratification” seems needlessly derogatory. There’s nothing inherently wrong with not wanting to wait two days for a purchase you make. We expect to get our purchases right away when we’re in a store. What’s wrong with getting our purchases right away when we buy them other ways, as long as it’s not hurting anybody? Sure, getting packages immediately may seem like a needless extravagance, but at one point so did stores staying open on Sundays.

 It’s a longshot that this will ever happen.  But let’s imagine for a moment that Amazon pulls this off.  A terrible road to go down, or awesome?

Laura Klein:  I’ll take a stab at “awesome”.  Drones make it possible to get things where they need to go faster and more flexibly than they currently can. Your mail gets delivered to your house once a day.  Your email gets delivered to you when it gets sent, which immediately makes people more productive. I think that’s a big reason why email is destroying snail mail.

On a small level, it could improve traffic. Not only would there be fewer UPS trucks traveling down narrow San Francisco streets, there would also be fewer suburban folks like me having to jump in their cars to go grab that thing they forgot to get at the drug store. If I need it in 30 minutes, I can have it in thirty minutes without driving.

Now when I shop there, I’m cooler, too. Thanks Jeff.

It also makes things much cheaper to send to difficult-to-reach places; for example, delivering medicine and food to places where roads have been destroyed by natural or manmade disasters.

But the real reason I’m predicting that it will be awesome is that every time I hear people worry that a new way of doing something is going to fundamentally change society or destroy civilization, I remember that these same concerns were raised about the printing press, the train, the personal computer, the Internet, and the waltz. Not all of the changes brought about by those inventions has been fabulous or predictable, but they’ve certainly been largely positive in my life.

We fall in love with ideas, with visionaries, with progress for the sake of progress. And that leads to failure.

Nate Bolt: Here’s what will happen:

1. An individual or company will crash a drone in a populated area and it will hurt or kill someone. Hobbyists know this happens with RC [radio control] aircraft all the time, but when it’s an autonomous quadcopter, the media will be much more interested. It’s the autonomous flight capabilities and awareness of its environment that make a drone a drone.  These things offer the promise of flying themselves, and a crash highlights the scariest part of technology–unintended consequences.  So it might be a car accident, the props might cut someone, it might just hit a pedestrian; who knows?

2. A high-profile privacy lawsuit will come about because of a drone.

   I do think many of us in the tech world will continue to experiment with drones, because flying and autonomy cut so close to the dreams of every nerd.

3. There will be a media shitstorm from #1 and #2.

4. The laws that exist will be enforced much more, and new laws will be passed. It will all of a sudden be laughable to think that in 2013 you could buy a DJI Phantom and crash it in the middle of Manhattan without much fear of prosecution.

5. The cost and complexity of anything drone-related in populated areas will increase. This is inevitable and probably a good thing. If Amazon or anyone wants to fly in populated areas, the amount of failsafe technology required will make self-driving cars look like cake. It will also cut down on the ability of photographers to legally capture images and video for artistic purposes. That last part is a bummer and why I try to cram in so much #DroneLucy photography right now.

6. Some use cases will eventually emerge where drones make sense for delivery. Basic physics aren’t going to change any time soon, and that means to carry even a five-pound payload, props and batteries will have to be big enough to make these things rather valuable and rather dangerous. But with the right object avoidance and failure algorithms, they will indeed make sense in some cases.

7. Sweet new gangs will emerge that are dedicated to shooting down drones, and they will get to design awesome stickers to represent how many drones they’ve shot down.

Victor Lombardi: The danger is in trying to answer this question using reason rather than experimentation. And that’s because drone package delivery is so new we have no idea if it’s awesome or not. To find out, we need to test it. The reason we fail to get these things right is because we fail to treat them as experiments. We fall in love with ideas, with visionaries, with progress for the sake of progress. And that leads to failure.

The very fact that we’ve written this piece and you are reading it means we’re interested in this as an idea. Meanwhile, there’s another organization testing the idea, quietly.

Like what our experts had to say? Guess what: you can have them bring their brains to you.  Laura Klein and Victor Lombardi are available for consulting and training through Rosenfeld Media.  And we’d be happy to introduce you to Nate Bolt.

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!

Downloading digital books to your favorite device

Given how many devices there are out there, as well as a plethora of formats and channels, it’s understandably confusing to get a digital book into your favorite reader. Worse, it seems that the digital publishing landscape changes every fifteen minutes or so.
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Future Practice Interview: Ginny Redish

As part of our Future Practice webinar series, we’re interviewing presenters to give you a preview of what they’ll cover. Next up is Ginny Redish on content as conversation. Ginny’s long list of accomplishments include co-authoring (with JoAnn Hackos) the classic User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, her soon-to-be-considered-classic Letting Go of the Words, and serving as a mentor to many in the field.

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Expert Interview: Lisa Welchman

Lisa is one of the planet’s go-to people for web governance, so we’re quite relieved that we snagged her to write our forthcoming book on the very same topic. She’s also available through our experts program for both consulting and teaching a course on web governance; check out her profile and let us know if you’d like us to connect you with Lisa.

RM: Why is website development such a common source of conflict within organizations?

LW: Because usually no one has outlined roles and responsibilities, or emplaced authority and budget, for website development. So managing the enterprise web is a battle of power and budget. Since no one knows who is “supposed” to make decisions about the web, organizations find that they can’t get the simplest of things done online because everyone’s arguing about font colors, technologies, information architecture, you name it.

After a certain amount of time working without an operational blueprint, an enterprise reaches a sort of critical mass of confusion. Managing the enterprise web without a plan or governance is like getting a couple of hundred people together on a sports field and saying, “Let’s play a game.” “What game?” “Just a game. OK. Go!” You’ll have chaos for a while, but eventually there have to be rules or else it’s senseless and non-productive (and maybe not fun). That might be OK if you’re making art or doing an experiment (like the early days of web development), but organizational web sites aren’t art. They are craft. And for most businesses, web sites are no longer an experiment. They serve a business purpose. Web site development has to be supported by an operational model that supports that purpose.

So much of business has shifted towards digital, yet the enterprise (people and processes, budgeting) is still engineered for 1990. By now, most organizations have had a website for fifteen or twenty years. That’s fifteen or twenty years of just making stuff up as you go along—playing a game with no rules. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but not by much. There have been efforts made to gain control through adding a headcount here or there to the “web team” (usually an understaffed, underfunded team with no real authority). But the management response to the web has been largely inadequate.

There are billion dollar, publicly traded, “brand name” businesses that don’t know how many websites or social media accounts they have, or who is managing them. They don’t know how much they spend on the web. Or they can’t do something simple like change the copyright date on all their websites, or find and change the name of the CEO. That’s crazy, and an exposure for the business and the brand. Senior management and executives need to understand that websites aren’t all design and technology “stuff”. They are business tools and they need to be taken seriously.

RM: So what’s the one thing you wish everyone knew about web governance?

LW: That, properly formed, web governance is an enabler, not straitjacket.

RM: Thanks Lisa!

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