Shortly thereafter interviewed with a bunch of different places: Amazon, which has a grueling interview process, and would have been quite exciting, except it seemed they weren’t interested so much in a user experience person as they were in someone who was more a designer who had UX chops; Critical Mass, which seemed very ad agency and interactive marketing driven, not much for usability and user experience practice; passed the stringent hiring process at TandemSeven, only to find no job waiting for me at the end due to the economic climate; talked to Fry, which seemed much like Brulant; talked to Acquity Group, which has great people, but the job was clearly not a good match for either of us. There were a lot of conversations that led nowhere. A lot of resumes submitted electronically, a lot of hustling. Finally got some work at Manifest Digital, which was alright, actually, took care of a bunch of us after a gig fell through after starting, and paid pretty well for a few months. Around October or so, I was very surprised to be approached by a recruiter for Siemens in the deep northwest suburbs, and started talking to them, and was faced with a pretty technical interview, but, clearly passed and was hired in short order. And since then it’s been a pretty interesting time.

It is at once disorientingly different and similar in strange ways. Because I am no longer working in e-commerce but in healthcare, on medical devices, the goals are of course quite different. We’re not developing methodologies either to pressure people into buying more or how to make it easier to find or buy things, aka, increasing lift and flow. We are however still helping users to achieve tasks and goals through interactions with an application. What we’re doing here is definitively traditional applications development, which doesn’t have web conventions, or the kinds of behaviors built into it that we’ve learned from the tens of millions of user behavior observations over the last 10 or more years. But then too, so many people have cast their lot onto the web that often times the desktop application development side has been overlooked as a result. I may take a course at Cooper Interaction Design in the near future, and there is a conference for improving the usability design of medical devices in Virginia later this month.

Mostly my disappearance from correspondence with you, my beloved readers, is due to me becoming familiar with this new work and the processes that we must undergo to ensure that the product gets launched in a safe and timely fashion. Our in-house process is fairly heavyweight, with oversight from peers and management and also compliance with international engineering and safety design standards, and the documentation process is also quite heavyweight as well. There have been things I haven’t had to design for before, such as whether or not an audible signal meets a sufficient level of loudness in decibels, or, a setup with two monitors. The team I work with has a mix of hardware and software competencies, people who came from other parts of the company from overseas, and there are clinical experts on staff. There are challenges working with an international team located at our headquarters in Forchheim, in Bavaria, Germany as well as in Bangalore in the state of Karnataka in India, the greatest of these is getting in the same time zone so we can get on the same page. Even though the common corporate language is English, I often find that a good interaction design diagram in the form of the particular kind of wireframes we learned to make at Sears Online Services (by way of Orbitz and so on) might makes things more helpful. But this requires that people be taught how to read them, and even when we used these diagrams at Sears, I didn’t think that the offshore team understood this stuff all that clearly. We’ll have to try a few approaches. I did show my German counterparts how we do this work here, and I don’t think they use the same methodology as I saw a few powerpoint presentations that demonstrate interaction. But none of these challenges is insurmountable, although, it does require quite a bit of time.

There have been plenty of site visits in the last year to meet with doctors, nurses, applications support and trainers. There are regulatory bars within this industry against gifts or tokens even for usability testing. Observing users is the same as usual, tasks, discount usability, so on, which is complicated by the kind of users we deal with. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing has been those moments when a patient is wheeled into the laboratory for an emergency procedure, or seeing an already very ill patient during a procedure, and usually the intervention must take place then or surgery for bypass must be scheduled immediately. It is at that moment that you realize that the kind of work that you are doing is important, far more important than almost anything else you have ever done in your life, because you are crafting tools that will enable someone to make decisions about someone else’s life. If that person was related to you, or was you yourself, wouldn’t you want that tool to be as precise and as easy to use as possible? And so, for all my complaining, I actually find myself quite deeply engaged in the work that I feel I should have been doing all these years.

“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”

I am learning all manner of things about our users. See, in my past work, if something went badly, the user didn’t get their purchase. But now, when things go badly, someone could die. That’s the difference between a good and bad user experience here.

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That’s what this New York Times article said alright: Red backgrounds for detail work, blue backgrounds for creative work.

The details are not important but essentially, in both cases, there is a workflow where a user explicitly engages a mode. In the first instance, the mode allows a user to start and stop a process and then the results are displayed back for the user to edit. But what if the user wanted to approve the results without editing? Would we display a modal dialog before edit mode? This was perceived to interrupt the user’s workflow. Instead we automatically saved the result before edit mode was engaged, system state was communicated back to the user, and then if the user so chose to edit they could do so, otherwise they could escape the mode. If the user chose to edit, that action would be a modify, system state would be communicated back to the user, resulting in a kind of edit-feedback loop until the user decided they’d gotten what they wanted and got the hell out of that mode. In this case, autosave helped us avoid a design nightmare: the user is not interested in dealing with a constant barrage of dialogs, but getting an accurate result so they can move on to their next task. 

In the second instance, we had a case where for an action involving tools, like in Photoshop with the tool palette, but for a tool where one has a number of ways of turning on the functionality. Well, the tools in the tool palette in Photoshop actually are a number of different modes, as it turns out. So too, when you use tools in the toolbar in Microsoft Office, you’re actually engaging different modes. These modes actually serve to help us before we become perpetual intermediate users by not letting us go too far astray. In the advanced mode, we start using modeless tools, that don’t require us to explicitly hit, say, the BOLD button to bold our text: instead, we might use a contextual menu to activate the function, or a keystroke, like Ctrl-B.

In this case, though, there was a problem where, with the best of intentions, the functionality was designed in a consistent manner, so that if you used the modeless method, the corresponding toolbar/palette feature would engage. This was fine for the modeless (and typically, they are intermediate and advanced) users, whose work was not slowed down, but not so for those who were still used to pushing buttons. For the button-pushers, this particular tool is applied repeatedly, serially, within a short period of time. But the problem was that after the user applied the tool, the button would click off, in order to be consistent with what was going on in the modeless method. This then forces the user to re-engage the mode by going back to the toolbar to press the button again, just to perform the next task with that tool, then it would click off, and they would have to repeat the whole thing over again. Very frustrating. So what we have decided to do is to disaggregate the functionality: if you use the modeless method, the tool button will not engage: this will suit the power user who didn’t need that anyway. If you use the modal method however, the tool button will stay engaged now until the user explicitly disengages the mode, thus allowing them to use the tool as much as they would like, which is to say, very much. 

Today we have absolutely no means available to realistically imagine the extent of the brutality of the cultural revolution called the Meiji restoration (1867), which managed to transform completely the purely Japanese “Edo Culture” into a Westernized one. However, people in those days probably expended a stupendous amount of energy on information gathering and study about the West. And no doubt they were also pained by the discrepancies between their traditional culture and Western culture.

Self-colonialism and the shame of defeat at the hands of America first under the threat of Admiral Perry’s gunboats in 1854, then by atom bombs 90 years later, still leaves a stigma in the national imagination that will not heal. Yet Hara forgets to mention the great military victory over Russia in the Meiji era, which not only put Japan on the map in the Western mind, it also frightened the West into creating the notion of the Yellow Peril, and, then too, there is a list of Japan’s own militarist imperialist exploits in Taiwan, Korea and China. Finally, Japanese design doesn’t exist in an economic vacuum, and arguably has not only already changed American design forever but through Japan’s ascendant economic hegemony of the 1980s influenced the design of Pacific Rim countries like Hong Kong and Korean, even into the present day.

Even in Asia, the intentional simplicity of the Japanese culture and tension generated by an object placed all alone in an empty space are unique. Any example of ornamentation or decoration from another Asian region will reveal dense, elaborate details. On the opposite end of the scale is the Japanese concept of contentment with simplicity and emptiness.

Perhaps this is where Japanese exceptionalism and historic amnesia collide. Wasn’t this sensibility acquired originally from Daoist and Chan Buddhist aesthetics from the Chinese mainland, and later refined by the Zen schools?

Here’s my idea: if Japan had not modernized towards Westernization, but had been able to impregnate its own traditional culture with modern science and developed naturally, surely it would have produced a unique design culture that could have competed with the west. This design culture would have been completely different from that developed by the Japan that endured the Meiji Restoration. If we read [Tanizaki's book] as a design book, we should be able to bring into bloom, in a place still far beyond traditional Japanese culture, a modernity that is neither known nor has ever been experienced before.

This theory, the first time I have heard anyone else but myself express this notion of design colonialism, I continue to turn over and over in my mind vis-a-vis Chinese design. It irks me. What if? Perhaps that is nostalgia and romanticism for a time and place that may not exist but in our imagination.

As for what’s going on here at Palm… let’s just say that it’s NOT business as usual. We are working on what is probably the most exciting project in the Valley, maybe the industry. I’m commuting to and from LA on the weekends to take up this challenge. Hopefully that gives you an idea of how exciting I believe this project to be. This is truly a rare opportunity.

After speaking to Matias and his team, or rather, from what they didn’t say, I was pretty sure that project was working on Palm’s next generation operating system, a competitor to Apple’s iPhone and a shot at recovering the glory that was Palm. Aside from moving to the Valley to toil for fame and glory, I had another nagging question in the back of my mind.

It’s quite clear that whatever leadership decisions led to the Palm Pre to be have produced a fabulous product. The real question now becomes, has the culture changed sufficiently at Palm so that they are now able to avoid the sorts of stumbles that brought them to the point where Apple was able to out-Palm Palm, or that caused Motorola, which was never a design-driven company to begin with, to fall into such a rut with the Razr.

The device, as we now know, is virtually irrelevant. For instance, paper still works great and it doesn’t require batteries. But, before digital cameras came around, and became integrated with cell phones, did anyone know that such a pent-up demand lay in taking photos wherever and whenever people found themselves? Did anyone know that people would use text messaging from their phones like an extension of their online messaging? These capabilities didn’t exist but tapped into people’s existing and unfulfilled wants.

User experience people, and in particular, interaction designers know this best: it’s really what the device enables the user to do — and how easily those devices are designed to make that happen — within his and her contexts that makes the device magical. But that’s just one product. It takes an entire company, aligned from research to sales to development and support, to make that experience happen over and over again. That can only happen if leadership is in position to make that culture happen.

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Initial thoughts:

I like it. As an information junkie, I feel I shall never be at a loss again about where to go or what to do. Probably as close as you get to becoming a walking, talking cyborg without having the connection actually in your head.

Wife not liking it so much. Says all she sees is the top of my head now as I’m using the device.

Allows me to do a number of things I used to carry around my laptop for:

• Access email, IM, and web in places where the infosec policy firewalls me

• Access my blogs and the OPML list of blogs I follow on Newsgator

• Access to Cantonese radio for Toronto, Hong Kong and also Chicago local news and weather 

• Photos, music, camera, video — all on one device 

Allows me to do a number of things I couldn’t easily do with my laptop

• GPS allows me to figure out where I am, real-time, on Google maps, either while in car or on foot. Shouldn’t be able to get lost in Chicagoland now. . . or be at a loss for what services are immediately accessible near my location

• Access internet services anywhere I get a signal, so, for instance, I can listen to Commercial Radio 88.1FM in Hong Kong — almost live, on the other side of the world! — in my car on these long commutes

• Google anything, almost anytime and almost everywhere

• Control the AppleTV when I can’t be bothered to use the remote 

• Send and receive cellphone calls & text messages

I like the contextually sensitive keyboard that automatically comes up when you need to do text entry on the web or elsewhere.

Will I be using this to transport documents back and forth from office to home, or using this in the future to do presentations? Hmm. The possibility is there but it is not realized. I would like to be able to run Keynote presentations off the iPhone. . . .

I don’t like that the keyboard targets are relatively small and feel they need to accommodate thicker fingers. And that the affordances for insertion are not immediately clear, but, generally, the learning curve was pretty low, since all the user behaviors are all well established and leveraged heavily. The gestures for multi-touch were new but not hard to remember.

Mail app lacks the spam filtering of the desktop version. Someone says I can route my email elsewhere, which is one less mailbox I have to worry about and also has a really robust spam killing function. 

NetNewsReader is so-so, drops a lot of feeds, but does the job well enough. 

Mobile commerce, here we come? Probably not likely for hard or soft lines, unless you’re in a store like Best Buy or Apple and the wait is ridiculous and you want to fulfill now. I do think the promise of mo-comm is contextual, and specifically, primarily about services, and around immediate gratification: tickets for movies, possibly restaurant bills, bill payments of all sorts, maybe books, travel, parking, maybe groceries even . . . 

Radio drops during busy times, sadly. Less than optimal. 

Battery life isn’t great: maybe like 3-4 hrs active, around 7 for standby? Charges quickly once attached with the USB dongle, but worried about replacing the battery later on. Will need to get a car charger and probably a desktop dock wouldn’t hurt neither.

A BT headset or wired headset is looking more useful by the second but given the short battery life, not sure how useful.

AYCE connectivity is pricey, and roaming internationally can kill you, but, actually, not too bad considering I am now completely wireless and laptopless, all the time. 

Need to figure out how to leverage this platform for my own nefarious purposes. . . . hmm. 

I am reminded about what Tim Andrews said to us back at Viant Quickstart in November of 1999: what you want to do is build the phone into a computer, don’t build the computer into a phone. 

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:d0cabdcc-97bc-4799-a579-4da3b73f865b&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Microsoft Office Labs &#038; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook">Video: Microsoft Office Labs &#038; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook</a>

After a few grueling months of interviewing and constantly running into jobs being placed on hold, I have accepted a generous offer to join Siemens Medical Solutions as a user experience designer/staff systems engineer in their angiography & x-ray division.

It’s a departure from everything I’ve done so far, but, I think that it’s validation that if you really are a good UX/IX designer, then your skills can be applied to just about any area of interaction. I’m really looking forward to joining this engineering team, applying my skills to understand the needs of everyone interacting with this hardware product,  and being able to build something really great over the long term product lifecycle.