Thought Leadership

What is Human-centered Design?

Human-centered design is everywhere.

Look, and feel the chair that you are sitting in right now. If you are sitting in a modern office chair it probably has adjustable arms, the height of the chair can be adjusted to match your height. Most likely the bottom of the chair has special contours to better match the shape of your butt. This is Human-centered design. The developers of the chair knew that humans would be sitting in the chair and they made special design considerations to make the chair better match their human user.

A Bad UX can cause Death by 1000 cuts

The ISO 9241 standard presents the definition of usability as Effective Efficient and Satisfying in a specified context of use.

When you design for the people that use your product - people will use your product!

We've often blogged about Section 508 compliance as a means to convince very engineering-centric developers to consider their users.

Accessible designs work for everyone - Ever use a curb-cut!?

By thinking about a disabled user and designing a solution that works for them, developers adopt a human-centered design strategy without even knowing it.

It is an excellent foot-in-the-door for designing for an admin user, a casual user, the sales team, an expert user, and many of other personas associated with the solution.

UX Consulting Survey

The team at Bentley University recently sent out a survey to UX professionals to learn more about their experience with UX consultants, and the type of services they need from a UX partner.

They received more than 200 responses from the survey and shared a few interesting findings from their initial data analysis:

Lauber's Law: The best error message is the one that you don't have to show!

One of the easiest ways to improve the usability (and perceived usability) of a web/application is to improve the text that appears on the screen specifically around labels, embedded assistance and error messages.

In many web/applications, there is a false assumption that all of the users are already experts. In many situations, the placement of a simple bit of embedded assistance will help the novice and intermediate users know exactly what to do.

Human-Centered Design for Healthcare IT Usability

The usability (or lack thereof) of Healthcare IT has been in the news a lot again.

This time a research report published in JAMA (Howe JL ; Adams KT ; Hettinger AZ; et al. Electronic health record usability issues and potential contribution to patient harm. JAMA. 2018; 319: 1276-1278) researchers analyzed voluntary error reports associated with Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and found that problems with EHR usability may have directly resulted in patient harm.

Pages