Design Research helps us understand user needs, pivot during the design process, and evaluate design quality. Two enormous benefits are that quality can be improved early, when it is cheaper to do so, and risks of rejection and dissatisfaction can be drastically reduced. Done well, design research pays for itself many times over.
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Making New Technology Approachable
When Autodesk started branching out into consumer-oriented SaaS applications like Homestyler, a home remodeling and visualization tool, we could no…
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Envisioning the Future of Charting
Along with the next version of emergency room software, which was an evolution of the existing one, I looked at…
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Validating Designs with Real Users
Design Validation with Usability Testing One of the key products in the Horizons Clinicals suite of hospital software was finally…
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When Lives Are at Stake
This thin-client software is for capturing patient data in the emergency room. We built the software in a .NET environment.…
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Design Criteria Define Success
So…we've visited customers and gathered thousands of observations. Now what? Do we send our giant spreadsheet around and call it…
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Observations Reveal Behavior Patterns
At McKesson, user research revealed patterns of behavior, as well as problems we could address with design. I visited 7…
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Mapping Functional Relationships
Many people are familiar with information hierarchies in the form of menu structures - the path one needs to take…
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Understanding Care Provider Workflows
Before any attempts to create or optimize software for professional environments like the emergency room, it is essential to understand…
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Understanding the Problem First
Tempting as it may be to only think about solutions, sometimes you have to dig in and understand the problem…
