Accessibility is good for everyone.
Accessible Product Design
Observations Reveal Behavior Patterns
At McKesson, user research revealed patterns of behavior, as well as problems we could address with design. I visited 7 hospitals to generate a list of thousands of observations. Then I added codes to each observation, such as where in the hospital they occurred and the part of the overall dataflow they impacted. Sorting by…
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Design Exploration and Innovation
Many hours of research and exploration are usually needed to identify product opportunities. In this case, spending time with EKG technicians revealed that the existing solutions were very unwieldy in the environment of use, and their outdated data transfer technology was causing data loss and delays in reporting. [caption id="attachment_1787" align="alignleft" width="193"] Heartsense Concept(large…
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Research Reveals Opportunities
HeartSense was a year-long research project to identify opportunities in the healthcare space. The resulting design prototype was not a functioning EKG unit, but as a general specification it addressed a number of design concerns that were revealed by user observation. [caption id="attachment_1789" align="alignleft" width="300"] An Hour in the Life of an EKG Tech[/caption]…
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Intelligent Living Office Partitions
This graduate school project was a conceptual design for living, breathing office partitions. The concept was called "Grobot", for growing robot. The bamboo plants provide a permeable, natural boundary that delineates work areas without cutting people off from each other. At night, the programmable pods drive themselves back to their charging stations. [caption id="attachment_1797"…
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Validating Mental Models
Often, it's tempting to begin creating or improving designs by jumping in and moving the elements of the design around, adding something here or there, to try to address customer concerns. However, experienced product designers know that surface treatments like this often do not address the real problems people have with using a design. We…
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Building a Multi-Language Interface
The instruments here are helping to protect drinking water safety around the world. I built a state machine driven prototype to define the user interface, and included a layer of abstraction that allowed me to reference three different language files. This in turn allowed me to test the user interface in the US, Germany and…
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Product Design for Worldwide Use
Handheld instrument design Hach partnered with two other leaders in the field of chemical analysis to create a brand new platform of devices for measuring pH, dissolved oxygen, and other electrochemical properties. This radical upgrade to a core product required careful analysis and iterative design to achieve. One of the main goals was to make…
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Testing Usability in Embedded Systems
For the DR/4000, DR/5000, AquaTrend and other systems, the effort put into trying out solutions with customers paid off big. We were able to reprioritize and organize features within the instruments to match user needs by getting feedback from representative users. I defined the interaction designs for these instruments, as well as the goals and…
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Embedded System Interaction Design
Interaction design for devices requires broad technology awareness and creativity.