Helping to Improve User Experiences through Design

I have been working on product design, user experience, human factors and human-computer interaction for over 40 years – across a remarkably wide range of domains incorporating hardware, software and, most often, experiences requiring hardware and software to play really well together.

In the mid-1990’s I led a team that produced results pointing to the need for the concept of user experience and we were working with Don Norman and others at Apple on this and related ideas. Don coined the term ‘User Experience’ around this time, though it took me longer to embrace it as a concept for design.

At IDEO I was part of the human factors leadership that articulated the idea of contextual, empathic research with the goal of identifying users’ implicit and latent needs. Of course this is now normal practice, but it is often not done very effectively.

Ever since those IDEO days I have been a committed promoter of  the three ‘R’ of prototyping (Rough, Rapid and Right) – especially as part of sharing with people a vision of their future user experience. Protopie is my current preferred tool for this work, because of the way that it allows one to be free of the tight scripting to often required in this kind of experience prototyping.

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Services

I am happy to offer my experience and expertise to help others create great experiences and great experience design teams.

In general I expect projects to probably fall into one of three categories (Design Research, UX Excellence or Strategic UX Innovation)– though I am always open to surprises and different ideas.

UX Design Strategy for Complex (Socio-technical) Systems
Experience prototyping and early concept research
Enhancing UX team effectiveness
Creating Authentic Conversations
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Portfolio

Here I am just trying to give a flavour of the diversity of products that I have worked on, with an emphasis on positive outcomes and powerful insights.

Of course all of these projects were huge team efforts, but these indicate some of the design experiences that my services can draw on.

The material shown here is generally in the public domain, having been published or presented at conferences and professional meetings.

Locomotive maintenance

Locomotive maintenance

Bringing digital experiences to an industrial space

This project was about the problem of bringing user experience into a digital transformation project – in effect, creating a digital experience.

One key learning was the now fairly obvious one that simply digitising the work (e.g. maintenance records being kept digitally instead of on paper) does not lead to a safe and effective digital experience. And talking to users about their needs of a digital experience is not very effective since they cannot imagine how it might be different – their focus is 99% on safely doing the physical maintenance work, whereas the digital system is about the management and recording of that work.

Furthermore, much of modern digital thinking does not readily apply – the work is inherently shared (the danger and the size and weight of parts means that many things require multiple people) and yet most modern digital devices are built to be personal, not shared devices. If a tablet were to be part of the process, then it would make more sense if the tablet  belonged to the locomotive more than to an engineer.

Furthermore, as well as the scale of the workplace (and the tools) there is the dirt and dust that comes with this kind of engineering – coupled with the weather that has to be suffered. Creating a great user experience for the locomotive maintenance engineers has many facets and no project, and no one supplier can redesign the whole experience.

Gas-fired Power Station HMI

Gas-fired Power Station HMI

Bringing user experience to human-machine interfaces

Power-plant human-machine interfaces (HMI’s) have been graphical for many years, but the underlying systems are now becoming significantly more digital, which leaves many HMIs behind as their design does not really support the kinds of automation now possible.

GE Activepoint brought modern design ideas (with regard to user experience) and contemporary human factors ideas (ecological design) to bear on this old problem. the result shows a very marked difference from the earlier generations of HMI.

GE ActivePoint HMI
Screen showing GE ActivePoint HMI for power plant operators
Screen from prior power plant HMI to show the contrast between old and new design.

Usability for a Radiotherapy Linac

Usability for a Radiotherapy Linac

Fusing MRI with radiotherapy treatments

The machines that deliver MRI and radiotherapy are inherently and seriously hazardous. Combining both of them into a single unit has enormous value (being able to clearly see the tumour and any movement during radiation delivery for example), but it also creates many new challenges. For example, the users who deliver radiation therapy are not the same people as use MRI machines and so there is a significant new training problem. Also, the UI has to provide comprehensible and usable information about the state of the MRI as well as the state of the radiotherapy Linac. And all embedded in familiar, but different  work processes. 

As with all medical devices there is a need to demonstrate the safe usability of the new device, with users who are not familiar with all the development work and in a context which reflects real world use.

Designing, planning and executing those usability studies was no small feat and took a very large number of people. 

Elekta Unity website
More about the Usability Process

Home and Kitchen PC experiences

Home and Kitchen PC experiences

What do people want of a PC at home?

A number of years after the first internet appliance, but before the arrival of iOS and Android phones and tablets, we were exploring what people need at home.

What is striking is how these prototypes enabled people to express themselves and their expected needs, but people also had deep scepticism about whether the promise of such products would really be delivered.

In particular they were worried about being embarrassed in front of their more tech-aware friends by having bought an unconventional PC.

Consumer Technology Customer Journey

Consumer Technology Customer Journey

Looking at experiences beyond the interface

Sometimes experience design has to look at the whole customer journey from pre-purchase through to end-of-life and recycling. And if your brand has many different products and product categorise, then you also need to consider the fact that a single person may be having user experiences of your brand across many different products (and expecting consistency and coherence).

When looking at customer experience one has to consider elements of the experience that precede usage, such as the experience of packaging. Or one might need to consider 'maintenance' (or 'service') tasks that occur many months later – for example, reprogramming your Harmony remote after changing your TV to a new model after 18 months of perfect experience using it.

EvenFlo Stroller

EvenFlo Stroller

Innovations that customers appreciated

Winner of the HFES Consumer Product Award in 2002 and featured by the Smithsonian in the Lemelson “Innovation at Play” exhibition, this stroller was soundly based on observations of real users out shopping, at the zoo.  Deliverables to Evenflo included a mind-map capturing observations, user comments, problems to be solved and solution ideas.

3COM Ergo Audrey

3COM Ergo Audrey

Popular, but well before its time ...

3COM wanted to create an “Internet Appliance” at a time when broadband was ISDN (maximum of 500 Kbps) and the idea of a home network was incomprehensible to most people.

The idea of an internet appliance was popular in all the user research we did and we were surprised how active people were on the internet with home speeds up to 28.8  Kbps.

Audrey was intended to use regular landlines with a built-in modem, which meant you couldn’t make (or receive) a phone call at the same time as listening to internet radio or doing your shopping.

Audrey was only on the market for around 6-12 months, but enthusiasts continued hacking them for many years.

Ergo Audrey on wikipedia

Vocera Communicator

Vocera Communicator

A push-button communicator

Dating from around 2000, when pagers were still a dominant communication product, the Vocera communicator was inspired by the Star Trek communicator badges, using early speech recognition to enable the whole communication to be done hands-free.

Our initial engagement was to help communicate the technology and the experience for investors. That initial video was constructed around the idea of trying to get an IT support person to solve a problem in an important meeting. Early releases of the product were used by the Apple Stores on University Ave, Palo Alto and at Stanford Shopping Center, to enable them to check stock and solve problems quickly and painlessly.

It later turned out that hospitals and healthcare became Vocera’s main customer and main domain of use. But the features that made it successful there, were all present in the original concept.

Vocera website

IDEO Method Cards

IDEO Method Cards

Enabling creativity in research methods

At IDEO, over 20 years ago, we realised that there was a danger of following the same ‘magic’ user research method every time – observing users in context. So a small group (led my Maura Shea and Jane Fulton-Suri) constructed a deck of 51 cards in four suits (Learn, Look, Ask and Try). There were 51 cards because there is always space for a new method, with the intention that the cards might help you imagine ever more ways of finding out about your customers and users.

Although initially intended purely as an internal tool, there was quickly demand from outside. In October 2003 Dan Pink wrote about the cards and how we used them in Fast Company.

Fast Company Article

UE Boom Software

UE Boom Software

Designing for uncertain bluetooth performance

When designing a new bluetooth speaker, the performance of the chip was uncertain and designing a hardware-based interaction for making bluetooth connections was a challenge – identifying the optimal design depended on unknown (and, at the time, unmeasurable) performance.

At the time, when bluetooth speakers were still unfamiliar, the idea of using an App on the phone to make the connection was not obviously a good idea. But the key insight was that it would be much easier to adjust a software-based experience later in development (or even post-launch) than it would a hardware experience (based on buttons and LEDs). 

UE Boom website

UK Coinage

UK Coinage

Universal Design in 1980

The Royal Mint wanted to introduce £1 and 20p coins in the early 1980’s and the Psychology Dept at Nottingham, where I was a student, was asked to help ensure the design of each coin reflected its value and would be usable by people with visual or tactile disabilities. In doing the research it became clear that everyone benefits from these universal design considerations since everyone likes to have a sense of which coin is which when reaching into a pocket or purse( for example). A well-sighted person may have no problem distinguishing two coins when looking at both of them, but identifying which one is in your hand without looking is a much more representative task.

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Articles and publications

Over the years I have written a large number of publications and articles. Some of them date from my PhD and are fairly dated now, but many reflect case studies and UX and design practice and are still relevant today. 

The full list of publications is available here and most have links to access the original or a pre-print.

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