Musings post-“Communities of Care”
Miscellaneous thoughts from/following this evening’s excellent PhillyCHI experience (thanks to @semanticwill and @amycueva for an awesome presentation):
- I miss healthcare UX.
Especially after this talk, the project I just did for INFO611, looking back at some of the work I did at Digitas, not to mention the current political climate surrounding healthcare…there’s just so much to be done, so many lives to impact. Not to mention, I miss fighting the good fight. With HIPAA and big pharma and all, the healthcare space is just chock full of barriers that make you want to smack your head against a wall most of the time…but that challenge just makes it more attractive to me in a way.
- Why don’t we have some universal EHR protocol?
Someone tonight brought up countries that have universal health systems, which our presenters didn’t really touch on. Can we learn from them, or are they struggling with interoperability and information exchange as much as we are? Okay, there’s no way they’re as bad as us…but what problems have they solved already, and what are they still trying to figure out? It seems like in the U.S. we’re doing this entirely backwards. The government is pushing for doctors to get with the 21st century and use EHR systems, but half those systems look and function like they were built in 1995. Getting everyone stuck on poor systems is just going to sour them. We need to start from the ground up with the users and the meaning of what a universal system could provide, rather than just focusing on the gathering, storage, and exchange of data. Those are all important — and perhaps the starting point in that we need a standard data language/protocol, but that standard must be informed by the contexts of use.
Now I just want to get a bunch of people together who’ve been looking at this stuff and saying the same things for years and get it done! Budget, mandates, and consumer demand be damned — I think this isn’t something that people won’t realize they want until get it and can’t live without it.
- UX happens at intersections and between the lines.
To begin with, it’s obviously an interdisciplinary field (arguably, the most interdisciplinary out there). We’re already operating day-to-day in the overlapping space of design, computing, marketing, science, hospitality, research, etc. But to go a step further, a lot of what we do is bridge gaps — between mental models and interactions, people and information. A lot of the talks I’ve seen lately and conversations I’ve been involved in have revolved around what happens in the gaps between everything our users do and know (or think we know). First, in his Interaction10 keynote, Jon Kolko bridged the gaps in the classic Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom model in a way I’d never seen in all my years in IS/LIS. Tonight, George brought up afterward with Will the negative space in the Webb/Butterfield/Smith honeycomb of social experience attributes as being the place where design happens — we don’t just design for conversation or or identity or presence. We look at those pieces and design in between the lines. And good design is when those lines disappear and the attributes blend together for the user.
- I want to study the culture of UX professionals and academics
Adding that one to my list of things to study if I ever go for a PhD or just have the free time/resources. Maybe I’ll go for an anthropology degree someday. This iPhone-toting, work-hard/play-hard, professiointellectual crowd is fascinating, and probably not just because I’m entrenched in it.
I’ll stop rambling now before I get too meta. Really looking forward to @saturdave’s “The User Experience of User Experience” talk.
