It’s important for me to keep my prototyping in at least two threads, and three if I am trying to understand detailed interactions with animation.

Thread 1: Flow, function, form, and data

• Starting on paper (actually usually a whiteboard design session with others). Focus on screen flow, then major functions and potential layouts of particularly important screens. Try for at least two different ideas.
• Next level of fidelity in Balsamiq. Add functional details, tune the layout, add concrete, meaningful sample data to the screen (in the context of a demonstrable scenario).
• Create a workflow prototype by stringing together a step by step, single path scenario with screens and specific expected interactions to move to the next screen. I tend to use powerpoint, putting all the screen mockups in sequence. This prototype lets you get early feedback with real users by pluralistic walk-throughs, which are very effective for refining concepts, workflows, functional requirements, terminology, etc.
• Iterate early, often, and quickly.

Thread 2: Visual program and style

• Using some of the key mockups from thread 1, visualize them (as comps) in pixel-level detail using Photoshop or some other similar mechanism. Explore color, proportion, visual metaphors, typography, etc. Generate at least 3 ideas.
• Get feedback on these independently of the workflow prototypes. Use preference-testing, AB testing, critiques, charettes, etc.
• Iterate and refine.

Thread 3: Detailed interaction and animation

• Focusing on a single, detailed interaction or animation sequence hack together a functional prototype in whatever tools work best for you: HTML/CSS/JS, Flash, lower-level programming languages, UI component frameworks/libraries, etc. At least two alternative interactions.
• Run a small number of short usability tests including timing data collection. Do comparative tests. Count keystrokes/mouseclicks/gestures.
• Iterate and refine.

In summary, build specific kinds of prototypes for specific purposes… to answer specific questions. No one type works for all situations. Keep the aesthetic concerns out of the workflow/function feedback loop. Use appropriate, effective methods for the different types of questions. “Don’t cross the streams.”

I’ve found that almost all the fundamental design improvements come from thread 1 and thread 2, but thread 3 is necessary if you are going beyond the standard controls or your domain is new/complex/specific (e.g. gestural interactions, multi-dimensional model manipulation, custom controls for a fancy new OS, optimizing human performance in some dimension).

1. A few key behavioral-type questions (“Describe an actual situation in which you…”), in a phone screen before bringing them in for an interview. Not just basic knowledge, but how they think and work.
2. Have them do some prepared design work prior to the interview which they then present to a group at the interview. Need to be able to communicate, persuade, and stay professional and poised in a mixed group.
3. Deeper dives into experience, philosophy, and work approach in the interview.
4. Finally, have them lead a short design session at the whiteboard around a specific area you are working on now. It’s not only a litmus test for them, it should be fun, and you will get some new ideas from the interview even if you don’t hire.

Spend at least 4 hours with them in the on-site interview – but cut it short gracefully if it isn’t working out.

Here are my favorite phone screen questions:

1. What is your specialty? How would you describe your own balance of skills and passion in user research versus design versus evaluation?
2. Who are 2 or 3 experts/authors that most shape your philosophy, approach, and techniques in UX?
3. Describe a situation where you had to convince a developer of a better way of doing something.
4. Describe a situation where you had to convince a product owner, product manager, or marketing person of a better approach.
5. What are your thoughts on Agile development? How do key UX deliverables differ in an agile environment versus a waterfall or big design up front environment?
6. If you could design your next job, what would it look like? What would be your ideal role in a new job? Why are you looking for a new job?

Here are some example exercises I had them do prior to the interview (when I was doing medical informatics):

1. Ask the candidate to bring work products with them to the interview: products resulting from their direct work in UX design; measured results of their UX work on a project, documentation or explanation they developed for a UX process, method, technique, or practice; UX-related standard, guideline, pattern, or style guide they developed; anything else they are proud to show. Remind the candidate not to share any proprietary information that would breach any contractual or legal obligation they have, but do give a sense of their accomplishments, approach, and style.
2. Develop a concept for a web site used by a physician’s office to track and maintain information about its patients. The site is used to collect patient demographic information such as contact information, sex, race/ethnicity, and emergency and physician contacts; measurable physical information such as height, weight, blood pressure, and pulse; and clinical lab results such as blood cell counts, blood glucose tests, and cholesterol tests. Prior to the interview, in three pages or less, describe your process for developing the concept, an overview of the concept itself, and any other information you think is relevant for understanding and using the concept. During the interview, walk us through the concept.
3. Compare Google Health with Microsoft Health Vault. Prior to your in-person interview, prepare a one page summary of your comparison. At the interview, walk through your summary with the interview team.

Assure the candidate that they retain the intellectual property rights to any of their work for these exercises. Encourage them not to spend more than a few hours in preparation. Explain that we are most interested in understanding their approach, creativity, application of techniques, and communication ability.

In their design work, they should demonstrate at least the following:

• An approach to understanding and articulating who the users are, what their work is, and what motivates them.
• Design talent and familiarity with idioms, conventions, and patterns.
• Instrumenting the development cycle with many feedback loops, early and often.
• Engaging and effective oral, written, and visual communication. Deliverables should be professional and interesting.

Come on over and join the conversation. Build your reputation by asking questions and answering others. For this forum to be useful, we have to have real experts and researchers involved. It’s just starting up right now, so it’ll take some investment, but I’d really like to see this become a forum for real expertise rather than a number of newbies talking to each other (like many discussion groups are).

I’ve added my badge to the right-hand column of this site. We’ll see if I continue to grow my reputation.

My eight months at MedAssurant were very exciting and productive. The company itself has many challenges it faces during its fast growth, but I wish everyone I met and worked with there great success.  I was lucky to have a greenfield UX space to build on, and some wonderful colleagues who will remain friends. A shoutout to Dave Norris and Dave Skender who brought me in and made it a great experience.

I now move on to a great new opportunity.  BoxTone is a mid-life startup with a great product, a strong senior team that’s been together for 7-10 years, and a huge chance to dominate the mobile device management market. I’m excited to become a part of the team, and I look forward to taking the UX of the product to the next level.  The current UX is a great baseline, with some of the best dashboard design I have ever seen in a real product: true believers in Tufte and Few.

It’s a very small world.  One of BoxTone’s primary contacts at RIM (the BlackBerry people) is SVP Alan Brenner who was my director at Rockwell in the early 90′s.

Finally, for a bit of comic relief… my last couple weeks at MedAssurant were busy and productive, but the process of leaving made me a bit reflective and goofy.  I came up with this 12-step program for leaving your company.  Enjoy.

After some introductory material, a few HCIL Hero awards were given out, Ben Bederson presented a keynote on Zoomable User Interfaces, and then thirteen short presentations on HCIL’s current research were given, each for about 15 minutes.  Finally, lab tours, demos, and posters were presented at the lab itself.  This is a fun, high-energy group, and they did a fabulous job presenting very interesting research.  Bravo! Today, workshops and tutorials are being held, but I’m not participating in those.  On Wednesday, they held a pro-bono design service day for local non-profits.  I didn’t know about that soon enough; I plan to participate next year.

Six Attributes of HCIL

Jenny Preece, dean of the School of Information Studies, did a short introductory presentation highlighting the things that define and differentiate HCIL:

1. Exemplary research through hard work.
2. Interdisciplinary approach, across both the campus and the world.
3. Outreach, such as the service day.
4. Amazing food.
5. Supportive; they rejoice in and applaud each other.
6. High energy with extraordinary leadership.

HCIL Hero Awards

Catherine Plaisant presented the first annual HCIL Hero awards, for people involved with HCIL who have made great contributions in the world:

• Ben Shneiderman: Founder of HCIL and the field itself.
• Juan Pablo Hourcade: HCI for Peace; Digital technology for marginalized youth.
• Sharon Laskowski: NIST, VAST competition, and many other contributions to HCI.
• Kiki Schneider: Coordinator of the lab for the last six years; graduating and moving on.

HCIL Service Day

The lab organized a service day of pro bono design work for six area non-profits.  They had 43 volunteers, and it was an amazing success.  Next year, they plan to enlist other organizations and individuals to hold many instances around the world.

Keynote: The Promise of Zoomable User Interfaces

Ben Bederson reflected on his 15 years of research into Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), including early ideas and hopes, successes and challenges, and what aspects of the ideas have “stuck” and become commonplace.

• Google Maps may be the most well-known instance of the idea to date.
• 1994: Spacial organization of related documents. Works great for 100 things, may be okay for 1000, but doesn’t scale to 1 million.  Focus was interacting with the space, not just viewing and printing.
• Now: Huge individual documents (e.g. Google Earth) and small sets like slide decks, iPhone home, etc.  Not dealt with in early ZUI work.
• Microsoft PPTPlex and Prezi are examples of current implementations.
• Early work was all about navigating spaces.  It required special devices with special controls to do well.
• Today, focus is on navigating content, generally in large linear lists, with a small set of useful and easy to use zoom functions (such as the zoom slider in IE7/8 and MS Office or the zoom functions in many View menus).
• Lessons from PhotoMesa: Treemap of lots of photos in groups (folders).  Learned that people aren’t good at scanning unstructured 2D spaces, so most modern photo management software has long lists, which people are good at scanning.  Another deficiency: the layout wasn’t stable as the content changed, so spatial memory was hampered.
• Lessons from SpaceTree/TaxonTree: When showing hierarchical overviews, the children should not get smaller. No way to get a real overview.
• For mobile devices, LaunchTile predated the iPhone by a number of years.  And the iPhone mis-implemented it by zooming from the center rather than from the selected icon.
• See current products like Canvas for OneNote, SeaDragon, and Zoomobi ZoomCanvas.
• Benefits of ZUIs: engaging/fun, feels natural, helps some task performance (harms others), creative potential, overviews, animations.
• Challenges: hard to scale, hard to author, temporal issues, … [moved too fast for me to get them all down]
• ZUI design guidelines: need small representations of each object; keep same aspect ratios when zooming; consistent spatial layout; meaningful layout; scannable layout; don’t do too much – breadth over depth; simple navigation.

Session I: Communities

Self-Promotion in 140 Characters: The Use of Twitter by Congress

Jennifer Golbeck presented research on the use of Twitter by senators and representatives.

• More republicans than democrats are tweeting (125R, 65D, 2I). No one from Maryland.
• Republicans have a tighter follower network amongst themselves (visualized by NodeXL).
• Analyzed approximately 6000 tweets using content analysis techniques.
• Mostly informational posts, then locations/activities.  Mostly sound bites, self-promotion, position statements.
• A few good back and forth debates (e.g. one between a republican and democrat that lasted from noon to 3am). Some direct rep to constituent communication. Some support of transparency (e.g. tweeting from closed-door session).
• Recommendation: Communicate, don’t just broadcast. Good advice for anyone using Twitter, not just Congress.

Analyzing Social Networks with NodeXL

Derek Hansen presenting research on using NodeXL, an Excel plug-in for visualizing networks, to analyze social networks.  The goal of the project was to make Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods easier to use and visualize; most current specialist tools are powerful but complex.

ManyNets: An Interface for Multiple Network Analysis and Visualization

Manuel Freire presented research on a tool to help analyze and compare multiple networks, even thousands of them, or divide individual networks and compare within.  It was a very technical presentation where I didn’t have the grounding in network theory and SNA to grok it all. It seems like a powerful technique in the right hands.

New Design Methods for Children: Layered Elaboration

Greg Walsh presented research on a co-design technique with children where an initial design is done on paper with a group of children, the design is explained to others, then that design is handed to another group that augments the design with a transparency over-top.  This is repeated up to seven times (because the transparencies get cloudy after that).  They have also prototyped a digital version for performing this long-distance.  The method is non-destructive (the new groups augment, but never remove/erase) and asynchronous (the groups can pass it back and forth over time).

This one made me think about how cool it would be if Balsamiq Mockups supported separate layers that individuals could augment and annotate other peoples work over time.  I’m going to suggest it to them for their MyBalsamiq web-hosted product.

Designing Social Musical Technologies at Carnegie Hall

Allison Druin presented research in collaboration with the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall where they are trying to capture the energy, loudness, and creativity of live musical performance in a long-distance collaborative social networking and creation model.  They have worked with projects that are collaborations between NYC and New Delhi, India and NYC and Mexico City, Mexico.  Musicians used co-design techniques to design their own textured lighting for their live performances.  The project is in its early stages, but is exploring how can our visceral experience of audio be incorporated into social media.

Session II: Text and Translation

Human-Computer Collaborative Translation

Chang Hu presented research on using single language speakers in a human-machine collaborative model to provide translation that is higher quality than machine translation but lower cost than expert translators, and also makes it easier to find people to do the translation work, especially between languages where finding someone bilingual would be really difficult.  The process basically involved two single language speakers iteratively improving machine translations with non-textual annotations passed back and forth between the two people to augment the iterative machine translation.

Finding Entries in an On-line Arabic Dictionary

Sarah Wayland presented research on ways to help non-Arabic speakers use an Arabic dictionary so they can communicate with Arabic speakers on social networks.  “Arabic is not English” was the main message; there are many ways in which the language and its written form are extremely different than expected by English speakers, so their ability to use dictionaries is very small.  A finite state machine was developed that helps with many of the common translation problems to help them use a dictionary successfully.  The model can be customized to deal with unique elements of any language.

iOpener Workbench: Tools for Rapid Understanding of Scientific Literature

Cody Dunne presented research on an interactive tool to support quickly generating summary literature survey articles using the text of the articles and their citations themselves.

CrowdFlow: A Human-Computer Hybrid Cloud Computing Model

Alex Quinn presented research on computer-learning systems that incorporate human work and judgment into accomplishing tasks, using Amazon’s Augmented Turk.  Cost, speed, and quality can be adjusted against each other based on needs.  The basic model has a machine generated solution checked by a human to decide if it is worth “fixing” or just “do over”.  Then a human does the “fix” and its quality is checked again.  The example used was finding human forms in surveillance video, which reminded me of Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta stemming from his book On Intelligence.  That vision engine plugged into this model could make a quite powerful human-computer hybrid!

Session III: Search

How Children Search Online at Home

Allison Druin presented research on a year-long contextual study of how children perform search on the web, because children are often frustrated in using current search mechanisms.  They studied 7, 9, and 11 year olds, both boys and girls, and discovered seven different “search roles”: developing, domain-specific, power, non-motivated, distracted, visual, and rule-bound. Individual children demonstrate multiple roles at different times.  There are definite age and gender differentiators in what roles are demonstrated.

Finding Temporal Patterns in Electronic Health Records

Krist Wongsuphasawat presented research on continued development of tools to allow finding patterns in categorical temporal data, building on LifeLines, LifeLines2, and Similan.  One of the interesting elements incorporated into the new LifeFlow tool is the use of Icicle Tree visualizations (invented by Jean Daniel Fekete).  Also, the civil engineering department at UofM is interested in applying these techniques to accident data sets.

Analyzing Trends in Science and Technology Innovation

Ben Shneiderman presented early research on how we might be able to predict the viability and success of scientific and technology ideas via metrics such as publications, citations, etc.  How does the system of publications lead to research and development leading to sales? One case study he covered historical time-lines of treemaps versus cone trees versus hyperbolic trees showing the success of treemaps but no matching success for the others.  Interesting, difficult analysis work, but no strong causal theories have emerged yet.

User Experience Designer

MedAssurant is a leading medical informatics solution provider with an advanced technology infrastructure and one of the largest databases of medical information in the world. We are growing quickly, expanding our portfolio, and continue to differentiate ourselves with a deep focus on our users.

Become a key part of transforming the healthcare industry by creating breakthrough user experiences for the next generation of our products and services. As a member of the Engineering Excellence team, collaborate with other designers and architects in this entrepreneurial, energetic, creative, and fast-paced environment. Work and communicate across all teams, functions, and business divisions to deliver industry-defining solutions with the most delightful, engaging, and productive experiences for our customers and users.

Responsibilities

• Lead user-centered design efforts for specific projects from ideation through delivery and beyond. Perform user research, competitive analysis, concept development and evaluation, workflow, navigation, user interface, and visual design, feedback and iteration with users and other stakeholders, expert reviews, usability tests, and other methods.
• Collaborate with business and product owners, development leads, project managers, and operations management to ensure that user experience quality is achieved and sustained through appropriate use of processes, standards, and methods throughout the project lifecycle.
• Articulate user experience goals, define meaningful measures, and evaluate tracking toward and achieving those goals.
• Develop models, mockups, prototypes, and other demonstrable artifacts to elicit and collect feedback from various stakeholders.
• Communicate research, concepts, requirements, and designs with internal teams as well as external clients and users, in person and through written and visual models, presentations, and specifications.
• Develop standards, guidelines, and style guides to ensure consistency within and across products.
• Recommend and deploy tools, standards, and other resources and coach other cross-functional team members in their effective use.
• Teach and mentor developers, architects, business analysts, and other team members in areas of expertise.

Qualifications

• Five or more years of experience in user experience design in a multi-product commercial software environment, with a track record of delivering great products.
• Two or more years of experience applying user experience techniques in an agile software development environment.
• Bachelor degree or higher in a relevant field such as human-computer interaction, interaction design, information architecture, human factors, software engineering, or computer science.
• Strong, demonstrable skills in all aspects of user-centered design principles, processes, and techniques.
• Excellent facilitation skills.
• Excellent organizational, cross-functional collaboration, and leadership through influence skills.
• Excellent written, oral, and visual communication skills, demonstrated anywhere from live whiteboard sketching to polished client deliverables.
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills, plus attention to detail and “fit and finish.”
• Effective work balancing and time management across multiple projects at different stages in their respective lifecycles.
• Highly productive individual contributor as well as valuable team player who likes to lead by example and create a dynamic and exciting work environment.
• Skilled with tools for visual design, wireframe mockups, navigable prototypes, and standard office software.
• Specialized expertise in one or more of the following areas: visual design, product design, information visualization, healthcare information and analytics, social networking and media, design for six sigma, Microsoft and rich internet UI technologies.

Anyone who does usability testing should have a look. It’s the next generation of their software suite for conducting, logging, reporting, and creating highlight videos for moderated usability evaluations.  They have a free trial available and discounts for students and current users of Morae.

It’s designed for individuals or small teams, doesn’t require any hardware beyond the host computer, and does support an optional second computer for real-time logging.  I’ve used their previous systems, and they’ve always had the ones that really understood the work and purpose of usability testing.

Of course, you may be interested in their other products and services.  I highly recommend them, and wish them great fame and fortune.  Rock on!

It’s still snowing steadily, but not hard.  I’m sure we’ll be outside shoveling a number of times.  It’s pretty heavy snow.  Good packing for snowballs and snowmen.

UPDATE (Feb 6, 2:30pm): At least 26″ have fallen, and it’s still snowing.  A bunch of us in the neighborhood got together and shoveled channels between our houses to facilitate the movement of children, dogs, and alcoholic beverages.

UPDATE (Feb 6, 4:00pm): It has stopped snowing, finally.  We got somewhere close to 30″ total.  I’ll post pictures later this weekend.

UPDATE (Feb 6, 7:00pm): The blizzard is over.  The sun came out a bit between 5 and 6:30.  Tomorrow, low 30′s and sunshine.  On Tuesday, we may get a few inches more, and then maybe some more next weekend.  Record-breaking all over this area.  Of course, this is par for the course in Cleveland.

I’m really enjoying my new job.  I’m getting to do real collaborative design work, including direct participatory design.  I’ve been pioneering K-J analysis on the teams to prioritize and focus project efforts, and the meme has caught on.  I’m establishing standards for forms and questionnaires as well as information visualization for BI reporting.  And I’m helping ensure that Scrum methods are being used effectively and sustainably.

Lots of work to do, and it’s just me for now in the UX role.  I should be able to hire some additional designers sometime next year.