01 Sep 2009 1616H

So, what have you been up to?

Sit down, kiddies . . . listen to your ol’ Uncle Gene tell you a story. A little over a year ago, I stopped freelancing at Sears Online Services, where I’d been working for a beta service that Sears was looking at growing called MyGofer.com. We — meaning a team of about three IAs and a lead — were able to pull off a number of online shopping innovations which actually translated to the direct commerce site before tough economic times resulted in their circling the wagons. Quite surprisingly saw some assets archived that I and Ben Watson cut back in 2000 while working for Viant, don’t know what kinda holiday they were keeping that for!

Shortly thereafter interviewed with a bunch of different places: Amazon, which has a grueling interview process, and would have been quite exciting, except it seemed they weren’t interested so much in a user experience person as they were in someone who was more a designer who had UX chops; Critical Mass, which seemed very ad agency and interactive marketing driven, not much for usability and user experience practice; passed the stringent hiring process at TandemSeven, only to find no job waiting for me at the end due to the economic climate; talked to Fry, which seemed much like Brulant; talked to Acquity Group, which has great people, but the job was clearly not a good match for either of us. There were a lot of conversations that led nowhere. A lot of resumes submitted electronically, a lot of hustling. Finally got some work at Manifest Digital, which was alright, actually, took care of a bunch of us after a gig fell through after starting, and paid pretty well for a few months. Around October or so, I was very surprised to be approached by a recruiter for Siemens in the deep northwest suburbs, and started talking to them, and was faced with a pretty technical interview, but, clearly passed and was hired in short order. And since then it’s been a pretty interesting time.

It is at once disorientingly different and similar in strange ways. Because I am no longer working in e-commerce but in healthcare, on medical devices, the goals are of course quite different. We’re not developing methodologies either to pressure people into buying more or how to make it easier to find or buy things, aka, increasing lift and flow. We are however still helping users to achieve tasks and goals through interactions with an application. What we’re doing here is definitively traditional applications development, which doesn’t have web conventions, or the kinds of behaviors built into it that we’ve learned from the tens of millions of user behavior observations over the last 10 or more years. But then too, so many people have cast their lot onto the web that often times the desktop application development side has been overlooked as a result. I may take a course at Cooper Interaction Design in the near future, and there is a conference for improving the usability design of medical devices in Virginia later this month.

Mostly my disappearance from correspondence with you, my beloved readers, is due to me becoming familiar with this new work and the processes that we must undergo to ensure that the product gets launched in a safe and timely fashion. Our in-house process is fairly heavyweight, with oversight from peers and management and also compliance with international engineering and safety design standards, and the documentation process is also quite heavyweight as well. There have been things I haven’t had to design for before, such as whether or not an audible signal meets a sufficient level of loudness in decibels, or, a setup with two monitors. The team I work with has a mix of hardware and software competencies, people who came from other parts of the company from overseas, and there are clinical experts on staff. There are challenges working with an international team located at our headquarters in Forchheim, in Bavaria, Germany as well as in Bangalore in the state of Karnataka in India, the greatest of these is getting in the same time zone so we can get on the same page. Even though the common corporate language is English, I often find that a good interaction design diagram in the form of the particular kind of wireframes we learned to make at Sears Online Services (by way of Orbitz and so on) might makes things more helpful. But this requires that people be taught how to read them, and even when we used these diagrams at Sears, I didn’t think that the offshore team understood this stuff all that clearly. We’ll have to try a few approaches. I did show my German counterparts how we do this work here, and I don’t think they use the same methodology as I saw a few powerpoint presentations that demonstrate interaction. But none of these challenges is insurmountable, although, it does require quite a bit of time.

There have been plenty of site visits in the last year to meet with doctors, nurses, applications support and trainers. There are regulatory bars within this industry against gifts or tokens even for usability testing. Observing users is the same as usual, tasks, discount usability, so on, which is complicated by the kind of users we deal with. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing has been those moments when a patient is wheeled into the laboratory for an emergency procedure, or seeing an already very ill patient during a procedure, and usually the intervention must take place then or surgery for bypass must be scheduled immediately. It is at that moment that you realize that the kind of work that you are doing is important, far more important than almost anything else you have ever done in your life, because you are crafting tools that will enable someone to make decisions about someone else’s life. If that person was related to you, or was you yourself, wouldn’t you want that tool to be as precise and as easy to use as possible? And so, for all my complaining, I actually find myself quite deeply engaged in the work that I feel I should have been doing all these years.

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