Macadamian Team

UI Innovations in Self-Care Software

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:49:22 -0800

Microsoft Healthvault and Google Health encourage users to enter their daily information for tracking purposes, whether it's a diabetic entering daily glucometer results or a fitness buff tracking weight and body fat. But for all but the most dedicated, browsing the website and manually entering data every day is simply more trouble than it's worth. The process of entering that data must be so natural that it becomes an automatic part of the user's day.

It's not a question of confusing UI or poorly designed UI - Google Health in particular is very straightforward in the way it allows users to enter this data.

When it comes to a solution that needs to track data daily, user needs simply go beyond what a software interface can offer.

QA Strategies for Medical Touchscreen (pt 3/3)

Didier Thizy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:40:00 -0800

QA Strategies For Medical Touchscreen Software (pt 2/3)

Didier Thizy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:17:00 -0800

QA Strategies for Medical Touchscreen Software (pt 1/3)

Didier Thizy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:04:00 -0800

When the design IS user centered...

Sylvain St-Germain — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:15:00 -0800

Been silent for a while although I have a pile of topics to cover here, not all directly related to process improvement... although... user centered design is non arguably a process improvement in the context of product creation activities... This is what this post is about.

Last year I offered myself an Ipod touch. Loved it at first sight as everyone. However I was quickly disenchanted when I noticed how the Music playing application was lacking advanced features. After all, beside selecting music and playing it you couldn't do much (it is still this way today) and to make it worse some functionality are implemented reverse. One notable example is how Apple offers us to manage play lists, rather than being song centric it is play list centric. Tell me who sits with its Ipod to create playlist? Unless I am so weird, it is when a song plays that I am thinking about which play list I want this song into. Anyway, I digress...

Apple did surprise me though with the way the implemented the concept of requesting a song via the Remote application. This is a piece of beauty from a user centered design stand point.

For the Remote application neophyte, Remote allows someone in a wifi zone where an Itune is found, to control it. This privileges can be granted to guest at your place.

Before the digital era we were stacking records to order the play list. Well, this is more or less what the Remote application and the ITune DJ allows to do with the "Request a Song" feature. This becomes very interesting in a party when many people have IPhones or IPods, it allows people to browse and search your library and request and vote for songs. Making the music experience of your gathering tied to your guests preferences.

What makes this feature useful is the fact that it is user centered, that it directly relates to a human behavior.

The point here is that as software consumers we should not tolerate anything but user centered designed products. It is obvious when you see such products, you can always relate the software flow to the related human behaviors and in all cases this makes the software much simpler and nicer to use.

This is the endeavor the company I work at has embarked on more than 3 years ago now. Since we cannot resolve the peace and war problem, let's make the world a better place to live through user centered designed software!

For an in depth presentation of Itune DJ and Remote you can consult this post.

Read the other side of the coin

Touchscreen Software - Risks and Rewards

Didier Thizy — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:20:00 -0800

What are patient demographics?

Quintin Armour — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:44:00 -0700

How Important Is Visual Design In Medical Software?

Didier Thizy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:43:00 -0700

Forecasting the Healthcare IT Market - Free Links

Didier Thizy — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:26:00 -0700

2011 CCHIT Certifications Summary

Tanya Dumaresq — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:25:00 -0700

Android - Custom classes from XML layout

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:58:09 -0700

Lately we’ve been working on building products for the Google Android platform. Once you get the hang of it, the Android SDK has a nice way of creating UI, at least when you use the Eclipse plug-in. Sure, it’s not up to par with it’s competition, like Microsoft’s Visual Studio or Apple’s Interface Builder, but it is to the point and convenient.

In Android, you can use a list view and define the layout for items in the list. You can even use different layouts based on item type, each with different heights and content.

Is looking good as important as being useful?

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:35:07 -0700

Consumer software companies have always been concerned about the looks, or visual design, of their product. Lately, in a phenomenon that some of us in the UX design space call " The Apple Effect", enterprise software companies, telecommunications companies, and medical device compaines are all placing far more emphasis on visual design. Recently a customer, who develops a medical software product, told us explicitly - we want nothing less than a WOW! from customers when they see the new product.

Is looking good as important as being useful? Is great visual design as important as great usability?

Yes. Not at the expense of usability, mind you, but yes - great visual design is important.

Whether we like it or not, we all make snap judgements about products. We make decisions about it's quality and usefulness in a matter of a few seconds. If you create and sell software for a living, this is critical. Your future customers are deciding whether they should spend more time getting to know your product, and deciding whether they should buy it, based on a snap judgement. They decide when walking by your booth at a tradeshow whether they should stop for a second look based on what they see in the screenshots. They decide whether they should pay attention to the rest of the demo based on the first few seconds of seeing the product. It goes without saying though, that visual design can't be at the expense of usability - we've all tried to use great-looking products that simply don't work. They both have to work together in balance.

People will have an emotional reaction to your product, and as we're seeing in consumer products, it has a direct effect on sales. How do you know if you're acheiving a "Wow-Factor" with your product? Test for it. Early in the design phase, put the mockups or prototypes in front of some users, and observe their reactions. Get them to tell you their first impressions.

First impressions matter, so go forth and make great looking products. Just don't forget about usefulness and usability.

Gallery Slider With Flex

Soleil — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:38:00 -0700

Maybe my search keywords were not so persuasive =) but I couldn't find any source of slider written in Flex. The only versions of movable sliders I could find were some HorizontalLists, that could step over the items, but not with a scroll animation. What I wanted was to make a small photo gallery that would react on browser window resizing and become scrollable. The second thing was to get a smooth scrolling animation on slider.

So here's the trick: I placed a HBox that contains all needed items - photos, in Canvas component with precise width and set the horizontalScrollPolicy to 'off'. For scrolling the photos I decided to change the horizontalScrollPosition and for smooth animation I added a tween effect, that will change the position values and update it each time value is modified.

This is the part of code where I use Tween:

new Tween(this, positionStart, positionEnd, 5000, 10, updateTween, endTween);

where I take the 'positionStart' and 'positionEnd' as 'to' and 'from' values of horizontal scroll.
The visual work is done by updateTween handler: it's changing the position of photo container by taking the current value and rounding it.

canvas.horizontalScrollPosition = Math.round(Number(value));

Each time left or right buttons are pressed, I take the current position as a start point and the 0 or maxHorizontalScrollPosition (depending on scroll direction) as end point, and add the tween for iterating through those values, modifying the scroll position.

That's all about scroll trick! Simple, nice and useful ;)

Some additional and AESTHETIC info

When using the tween, you can define an easingFunction, which describes how to perform the motion. You can find all function classes here. But I found another link that I was really delighted with (you can see effects of all easingFunctions, wohoo!), thanks to the author.

Seems I've nothing to add anymore.
No, I have, don't forget to resize the browser window.Enjoy!

Demo

Facebook makes amends with the Privacy Commissioner

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:30:27 -0700

Earlier in the year, we worked with the Privacy Commission to help audit Facebook's privacy policies, and Canada took a lead role in taking Facebook to task for it's privacy practices. In July, the commissioner ruled that Facebook was in violation of four of Canada's federal privacy laws, especially when it came to how Facebook granted personal information to application developers.

It looks like this story will have a happy ending. As reported in the Toronto Star last week, and more recently in the Globe and Mail, Facebook is working on fixes, and the two sides are reaching agreement.

How do you ensure an application is compatible with future web browsers?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:36:21 -0700

For this one, we'll defer to 3 expert panelists from Macadamian: Aaron Olson, Gord P, and Jason Mawdsley.

Aaron: The best thing to do here is to be compatible with current browsers using as few browser-specific hacks as possible (ideally none).

Gord: Choose an explicit set of browser+minimum-version before any other compatibility scope is defined.
Be prepared to accept "reduced functionality" for IE6 users. If you don't do this, you will compromise the structure and maintainability of your templates

Also, isolate hacks in separate browser-specific CSS / JavaScript files.

Do not agree to full W3C compliance, but strive for it.

Jason: Sort of yes to what Gord said. IE6 is still a significant share of web hits. I am not sure what the percentage is now.

IE6 support WILL be painful, and will cause a lot of work and testing.

Design to W3C standards, and have QC validate all UI changes with Firefox plugins and fail any non-compliant changes.

Aaron: One final note about W3C compliance - be sure not to use any deprecated features of HTML. Certain tags and attributes have been replaced with better, modern equivalents, usually involving CSS.

There is what looks like a decent list here.

During development, use the strictly-compliant DTD - this can save you from having to go back and fix non-compliant sections later.

Gord's right - strive for compliance but don't insist on it.

Can you suggest a content management solution for my .NET app?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:34:21 -0700

We're often asked for our recommendation on a good content management system that integrates with .NET. There are a lot of choices out there - one 3rd party content management system we've used is N2CMS (http://n2cms.com/). In particular we liked that:

it works natively with ASP .NET for quick integration with existing .NET pages
it uses ASP .NET user controls, allowing upgrade of existing controls on existing .NET pages
templates are based on the ASP .NET concept of master pages, allowing ASP .NET developers can ramp up quickly on the requirements of using the 3rd party.
free LGPL license

One possible disadvantage is capacity - I don't know if the solution could handle a very large amount of content (e.g. thousands of pages). It depends on the size of your web project.

If you've had experience with a good content management solution, by all means please add on to this thread.

Kanban: collaboration nirvana?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:24:37 -0700

I've been educating myself more and more lately on this Kanban buzz. For the neophytes, this is more or less the Toyota model applied to software development. One thing that struck me is how it enforces collaboration.

The cool thing is that I can relate to some of the inherent benefits when thinking of a project that I worked on a few years ago.

One thing Kanban ask you is to be lean. To be lean implies to have control over your queues. At Toyota it meant that the door maker guy would only start making new doors when the door installer guy would have only X left in his pile.

How does that translate to software you ask? Well it is simple. The number of stories accepted on the board are limited, the WIP (work in progress) is kept to a low number, similarly all the queues of your SDLC are kept to a small number too. There goes for the queues optimization theory, you can read more here.

The Gears of Healthcare

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:35:33 -0700

The healthcare industry works a lot like the agile software development cycle. Each morning doctors and residents meet to discuss what happened yesterday and agree on a strategy for each case for the day. The next day the cycle repeats with possibly different staff and different patients. As a result, healthcare is very process driven. It needs the structure to be able to maintain synchronization between all the people all playing their different and independent roles.

Software written for the healthcare domain has to respect these processes. If it doesn’t, it will be difficult to use and get rejected. One mistake often made, however, is the assumption that the processes are linear in nature, much like the waterfall software development cycle. For example, the patient visits admissions, then goes off to receive treatment and then gets discharged, without ever having to move back to an earlier stage.

Patients Have Veto Power

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:15:47 -0700

Creating software for the healthcare domain is a balancing act. Often clients will request that applications employ strict rules for form validation thinking that this will help to improve past problems with data quality. However, in a clinical application, constraints on the data will likely end up causing more problems than they prevent. The basis for these problems is twofold. First, it is usually a technician or a physician (not the patient himself) entering the data and second, the patient is a human being with the last say in all matters. He has the privilege to raise a red card at any moment in time and interrupt an examination or procedure.

Human factors in medical devices

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:15:03 -0700

The FDA requires that if you are developing a medical device that you pay attention to human factors and usability in the design. I recently attended a BayBio event where a panel of medical device firms talked about how they meet the FDA's human factors requirement and what impact it has on their product development process. The great news is that, at least for the companies on the panel, they already see usability and human factors as critical to the success of their product. For the FDA, human factors is a patient safety issue, and they are right. Poorly designed devices lead to operator error, which can put the patient at risk or result in misdiagnosis. The panel agreed, but they also use design to differentiate - they know that if they can design a product that offers the best user experience in their segment, then chances are they will dominate their field. This is especially true of new devices and startups looking to displace an established competitor.

One of the most encouraging stories was from Greg Kapust, CEO of Breathe Technologies. Breathe develops a ventilation device, and they require their staff to actually spend time living with a ventiation device. What an amazing way to develop empathy for your customer. We all know that one of the barriers to adopting user-centered design principles is that designers and developers think they know what's best for the customer. Walk a mile in your customers shoes sometime.