April 2012
1 post
3 tags
Solving the right problem
This new Ikea TV/Bluray/all common electronics/cabinet thing strikes me as an excellent example of solving the right problem. I think for most people, TVs and their associated paraphernalia are essentially commodities—the details and even the brands are irrelevant. The hardest part about putting together a TV-centered living room—the real problem—is making it all work together....
February 2012
2 posts
2 tags
4 tags
My first encounter with Danish healthcare
Last night, I cut my left index finger while cutting red peppers. The details aren’t too important, but it should be noted that the injury was very similar to one I received in college so I had a pretty good understanding of how serious the wound was.
In any case, this situation is a good opportunity to explore the differences in how I would have dealt with this situation had I still lived...
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
April 2011
1 post
9 tags
Social Search as Innovation in Meaning
Yesterday, I had a sudden thought that I immediately posted to Twitter using two tweets (follow me @chrismonnier):
The brilliance of Google’s PageRank is that it uses links and such as a proxy for the trust placed in a given source. Social media scraps the ‘proxy’ part and allows people to get info directly from trusted sources (friends, people they follow, etc.).
The more I...
February 2011
1 post
What counts as disruptive innovation?
This tweet by Timothy Lee got me thinking:
Disruptive innovations are simpler and cheaper than than what they replace. Laptops have always been more expensive & complex than desktops.
Are laptops disruptive innovations? Well, innovation can occur in multiple ways, and I like to think of innovation in two veins:
Innovation in technology - new electronics, parts, components, etc. that...
January 2011
1 post
Interested in healthcare? Check out my other blog!
If you’re interested in participatory medicine, patient engagement, or user experience, and innovation in the context of healthcare technology, please check out my posts at the Perficient Healthcare IT blog.
Thanks!
November 2010
3 posts
3 tags
The TSA as a Design Failure
The recent changes in policy at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) indicate that the TSA is failing as an organization. They are failing not because terrorist attacks have gone un-prevented (they haven’t), but rather because the users they serve are receiving an experience that does not meet their needs. The root of this failure lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of who...
Twitter and the cross-pollination of ideas
I just finished reading Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist (here’s a TED talk summarizing his main thesis and here’s an even briefer summary from Frog Design’s Design Mind) and found it fascinating. Ridley’s main argument is that humans have escaped a subsistence existence because of trade and the “sexual reproduction” (in other words, the mating of...
How I Voted in 2010
Here’s how I voted this year, along with a brief explanation for why I chose who I did. Further explanation below:
US Representative District 3: Erik Paulsen (divided government)
State Senator District 42: David Hann (divided government, assuming Mark Dayton wins the governor’s race; also support for school choice)
State Representative District 42B: Jennifer Loon (divided...
October 2010
3 posts
Idea for Twitter client
Sometimes I check Twitter and there’s way too much in my Twitter stream, and other times there’s too little. So my idea (which for all I know already exists) is for a Twitter client that always shows you “x” updates per 10 minutes. So if it’s a slow period, maybe it gives you tweets that it thinks you’ll like. And if it’s a rush period, it will filter the...
September 2010
3 posts
July 2010
2 posts
Increasing patient empathy: what manufacturers can...
As discussed in a previous post, the key to getting manufacturers to have a vested interest in building empathy with them is to insert patients into the customer experience supply chain. Here is one thing hatmanufacturers can do to support this. Manufacturers can open up their data to third parties: For devices that record and track data, the status quo works great for manufacturers and doctors....
Increasing patient empathy: what patients can do
In a previous post, I explained how the unique economic structure of the healthcare market presents an inherent challenge for the cultivation of empathy between medical device manufacturers and patients. The gist of the problem is that manufacturers often sell their devices to doctors or hospital administrators, who then [usually] decide for patients which brand of device the patient is going to...
June 2010
3 posts
Why patient empathy is challenging for...
A hot topic in the design world recently has been the importance of building empathy between businesses and their customers, a concept well documented in the book Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik and Peter Mortensen. The basic case for empathy is actually pretty intuitive-by spending time with customers a business can better understand their needs and therefore deliver better products and services...
Android vs. iPhone: Which is more open?
Guest-writing at Megan McArdle’s blog, Timothy B. Lee riffs on the growing frustration that developers have with the closed nature of the iPhone platform versus the relative freedom offered by the open Android platform. I agree with Tim that this is a big weakness of the iPhone and that—if Android ever gets its act together—this could be the Achilles’ heel of the iPhone. ...
Android Gingerbread should get rid of the...
According to this TechCrunch post, Google is going to be improving the user experience of its Android mobile operating system. This is great news, and I’m sure their improvements will go further than simply making the graphics “prettier.” In my experience using Android on the HTC Hero and the Google Nexus One, the thing that hurt the user experience more than anything else was...
April 2010
2 posts
iPad Use Case Idea - Car Sales
Here’s another idea for how an iPad could be used: selling cars. Imagine a salesperson approaching a prospective customer on the lot and showing them a short and interesting video (probably not a commercial) and allowing the customer to explore some of the car’s specs on the iPad. Each manufacturer could have their own app designed to answer (in an honest way) the most common...
iPad Use Case Idea - Healthcare
UPDATE: iMedicalApps demonstrates that an iPad can be used in a sterile field here. Easy-to-use tablet devices (such as the iPad, which I’ll use here to generally refer to any easy-to-use tablet device) give us (humanity) the chance to fundamentally improve everyday experiences. One area where a lot of experience improvement is needed is healthcare. Human errors (many due to poor...
November 2009
1 post
Freedom of business model
Critics of libertarians often conflate capitalism with a handful of specific business models (like fee-for-service or ad-supported). This leads many of those critics to falsely conclude that anytime a libertarian supports an enterprise that strays from the bounds of these business models, that libertarian is engaging in behavior that is incompatible with “capitalism” and is therefore...
September 2009
1 post
Norman Borlaug
This weekend was a proud, yet humbling time to be a graduate of the University of Minnesota. Not because of the new on-campus Gophers football stadium, but because the world is remembering the life of Norman Borlaug (left, above), an alumnus of the University of Minnesota and a hero to mankind who passed away on September 12, 2009: Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular...
June 2009
3 posts
For a large country, the US does alright
Via Infosthetics, the above graph (culled from the Flash visualization here): …maps the base pay of the world’s parliamentarians, ranked by country and expressed as a multiple of per capita GDP, versus a “Good Governance Index”, which itself is a combination of the Democracy Index, the UN’s Human Development Index and the Perception of Corruption Index. In short, the...
So that's what an A/B test is...
The other day I was reviewing this great Alertbox article on user experience methods, and I came across a method with which I was unfamiliar—A/B testing. Well, sure enough, just like when you learn a new word and then it suddenly seems that you hear it used a couple times within the same day, this 37 Signals post points to a real world example of A/B testing. In this case, Less Everything...
4 tags
Target Price Tags Lead to Shopper Confusion
While browsing through the food aisles at the SuperTarget in St. Louis Park, I observed two separate incidents of shoppers not understanding Target’s price tags. Since I didn’t observe that many total incidents of shoppers interacting with the price tags, this seems like an abnormally high error rate. In the first instance, two women were chit-chatting while casually picking up food....
May 2009
8 posts
An Idea for Reducing Energy Usage and Subsidies
I had a thought while driving home after softball today and listening to an NPR report about the complex issues involved in developing a multilateral coordinated response to the problem of climate change, something that will be addressed head-on at climate change talks in December of 2009 in Copenhagen. Here’s my idea. Once Google PowerMeter and/or similar services becomes ubiquitous, each...
Einstein Expanded on Newton, but Newton is Still...
A great exchange from the two bloggers at Defective Equilibrium, the New Zealand version of Marginal Revolution: Udayan Mukherjee: This doesn’t mean we have to argue that markets are always and everywhere a non-starter. It is merely an acknowledgment that the model proferred by neo-classical economics is not the final draft of economic explanation, but that it is akin to the Newtonian...
Inspiration
There’s something incredibly inspirational about seeing Danny MacAskill attempt something extremely difficult and then finally master it. That’s what happens in the first 1:30 of this video. The rest is just awesome. Via Kottke, who aptly describes the above feat as “parkour on a bicycle.” Although I think the actual term is “bike trials.”
Are stoplights really necessary?
Via Tom Vanderbilt, the London borough of Ealing is about to conduct an experiment in which they observe whether traffic flows better at some intersections without stoplights: Ealing found evidence to support its theory when the lights failed one day at a busy junction and traffic flowed better than before. Councillors have approved a report which recommended that they “experimentally remove...
Fostering Increased User Participation in...
IDEO’s Tim Brown thinks that “participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society.” In a post specifically about healthcare, he envisions EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) and HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) as two ways to enable greater participation in healthcare. Fundamental to this collaboration is the creation of platforms that encourage...
Dynamic Haptic Displays: The Next Big Thing?
Dynamic haptic displays like the one shown above (from Chris Harrison) seem to really be gathering momentum and I wouldn’t be surprised if they become the next big thing in interaction design. The feedback channels of sight and sounds are already maxed out, but the sense of touch is currently underutilized (we can do better than just a vibrating phone). Another cool dynamic haptic display...
Corporate Nationality As a Branding Tool
Matt Yglesias on corporate nationality: Beyond CEOs, Nestle has 15 directors. Of them one is Indian, one is Swiss/American, seven are Swiss, and the rest are from other European countries. But there’s nothing especially “European”—and certainly nothing Swiss—about the company’s actual operations. They earn a lot of money in Europe, but the majority of their revenue is from outside of Europe, and...
Customer Experience In Healthcare
Jay Parkinson: I’ve started collecting photos I take of medical clinics vs. veterinary clinics in the same neighborhoods. If anyone has some good examples, send them my way…but here’s the first. Just goes to show that when people pay their own hard earned money for healthcare, providers start competing on price and quality and appearance…essentially, the consumer experience.
April 2009
8 posts
Interaction Design Ethics
This post at the IxDA Discussion forum got me thinking about a thought I had a while ago about the ethics involved with applying the results of user research/usability testing to product design. I was thinking about users’ misperceptions regarding what a product does or how it works and then how to deal with those misperceptions in successive product iterations. Specifically, when is it...
Protectionist Law Impeding Competition, Consumer...
This issue should be a non-issue. The developer aiming to bring the popular Trader Joe’s grocery chain to Minneapolis got a wary reaction from residents and others at a Whittier neighborhood meeting Monday night. Some residents spoke in favor of the plan, but others—including the Wedge Natural Foods Co-op less than a half block away—say the corporate retailer shouldn’t get any special favors that...
Sarcasm Is Good
With talk of a CPSIA for food getting me all worried, I appreciated this bit of sarcasm from Reason’s Jesse Walker regarding an odious Pennsylvania food safety law: Unfortunately, the inspectors’ fight doesn’t go far enough: What about the home meal loophole? Every night across America, parents cook unlicensed dinners for their naively trusting kids, and perhaps even a guest or...
Have Novel Touchscreen Interfaces Fulfilled Jef...
For a class called “The Psychology of Human-Machine Interaction,” I was assigned to read Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface (cover pictured to the right). At the time (2004, probably), I was really intrigued by Raskin’s idea of zoomable interfaces and the notion that discrete applications are an inefficient way to facilitate users’ desired actions, but it all...
How People Spend Their Time During Work
This map showing Zappos purchases in real-time across the US is very interesting. What I found particularly intriguing is that as lunchtime occurs in a given timezone, purchases seem to slow to a trickle. Meanwhile, there seems to be a post-lunchtime flurry of activity. All anecdotal observations, of course. Via Marginal Revolution.
CPSIA For Food
You know that new law that was passed that requires excessive testing of products to prove they don’t contain lead (CPSIA)? Well, now there’s a proposal to do the same thing for food! Thanks, government, for trying to make farmers markets illegal! Image (with some editing) from here.
Design Thinking and Government
I’m very intrigued by the potential that design thinking has to offer government. Of course, nothing has more inertia than government and it is inherently ultra political, so altering the way government works is extremely challenging. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful, and stuff like this from IDEO’s Tim Brown is encouraging: What if design was used to test some of the rules our...
The growing importance of experience design
This is a very interesting post by David Armano which does a good job of putting into words what has been in the back of my mind for the last couple of months. Basically, he’s seconding the proposition of this Economist article, which is that the economic crisis has hastened the phenomenon of people second-guessing whether the constant struggle to keep up with the Joneses by acquiring as...
March 2009
3 posts
Imeem...please let me scroll with ease!
I love imeem, but I think their user interface has plenty of room for improvement. One small thing that’s really been annoying me recently is how scrolling through a playlist works. To see what I mean, try clicking on the “up” or “down” arrows in the following embedded playlist: Smart The scrolling increment (how much up or down the list moves when you click on an...
Chevy: Ergonomics is for Girly Men! Yeah!
I’m really getting sick of this commercial, which has been in heavy rotation during the NCAA Tournament: So making something easier (and most likely safer) to use is emasculating? Because real men work harder, not smarter?!?
Talk About a Nudge!
This bus stop ad for a fitness company in Amsterdam features a bench that shows the weight of the person sitting on it. Via Kottke.
February 2009
5 posts
The Santelli Rant and Who's to Blame
I admit, when I first saw the rant above by Rick Santelli opposing the Obama mortgage plan, my emotions were stirred and I had to agree with the spirit of his frustration. People like Brian Beutler, Ryan Avent, and Matt Yglesias dismissed the rant in part because Santelli (and the traders who empathize with him) didn’t publicly oppose the various bank bailouts. In the eyes of Beutler and...
Meta Analysis: The Constitution During the Civil...
Via Information Aesthetics comes this Wordle-like data visualization tool that shows the frequency with which certain words are used in a big word cloud. One thing that jumped out at me was the difference between Abraham Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses. Here’s the word cloud from his first address: And here’s the word cloud from his second address: The thing I...
Designing Product Experiences vs. Designing...
I love this quote from Brian Thomas Collins: Brilliant design cuts out the marketing middleman – the traditional art directors and copywriters – and creates its own media. Like Occam’s Razor, it whittles the marketing equation down to simplest principles: the best experience wins. Not the best promise. Not the cleverest copy. Not the Big Idea or the biggest budget. The best experience wins. Via...