Ask the experts: Talk with Kishan (Design & Human Factors Lead)

Ask The Experts

A new milestone, UXness has initiated a step to connect with experts and understand their thoughts on certain topics. Directly connecting with experts and hearing from their own words, doesn't it sound interesting? Yes it is. In this series, please welcome UX Expert - Kishan Salian (Design & Human Factors Lead). 

Expert Bio

 Kishan Salian

Design and Human Factors Lead
Laerdal Bangalore LLP

I have been working with Laerdal Bangalore LLP from the last 2 years as Design and Human Factors Lead. My primary role has been to build and manage a team of talented UI and UX designers, Propose a robust UX roadmap which includes setting UX vision, align with stakeholder goals, and prioritizing ideas for the projects. I have over 15 years of combined experience in User Experience and UI Design and hold a master's degree in Interaction Design. I have mainly worked in the area of User Experience, User-Centered Design, Ubiquitous Computing, Child Computer Interaction, and Web Accessibility.

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Designing for Healthcare and Post Pandemic 

Q. You have an amazing experience of crafting design solutions for various domains, how the healthcare domain is different from all when it comes to user experience design? 

I'm fortunate to have an opportunity to work in various domains from retail, banking, insurance, to travel throughout my career. I have been working as a Design Manager crafting experiences in the area of education in healthcare. It has been the most exciting and challenging experience while working for the medical and healthcare domain. 

Designing for healthcare can be different from other domains as the design solutions provided could directly or indirectly impact the lives of the people around us. 

The World Health Organisation (WHO) (6) has estimated that nearly 138 million patients witness harm caused by medical errors every year, in medium and low economic status countries (including India) (WHO, Medication Without Harm). A Harvard study by Prof Jha (7) says that 5.2 million medical errors are happening in India annually. Similarly, the British Medical Journal quoted that India like any other developing country is recording a lot of medical errors. 

It becomes very important for the user experience practitioners to take up the initiative of understanding the healthcare domain, identify the critical problems through rigorous user experience research, and carefully craft the best solutions to match the end-users mental model. 

Q. What is the role of user experience in the healthcare domain for crafting a better experience? 

A major shift that has been noted in the area of healthcare from a process-centric to a patient-centric approach. The user-centered design approach has been seen as the future of healthcare. Empathy will play a key role in closely relating to healthcare professionals and connecting with patients while designing the best experiences. There is a huge opportunity for designers to design an ecosystem of care. The designers have to take into consideration a few points while crafting the best experiences.

Design for clarity, efficiency, and effectiveness

Beyond any respective domains, a designer should always take into consideration the various facets of the user experience like useful, usable, desirable, valuable, findable, accessible, and credible. When it comes to designing for healthcare there are few of these facets that could weigh more than others. 

Bansi Mehta (1) has wonderfully explained that a UX designer must keep that in mind, especially in healthcare, the design needs to work like a scalpel and not like a Swiss knife, i.e. the design needs to be simple and intuitive and not distracting. The UX designer must resist the urge to over-design. The design should not overburden the healthcare professionals with the cognitive load which may cause someone to commit grave mistakes. 

The applications at its core should adhere to a few factors like being usable, findable, and accessible while other facets could support based on the context of use within healthcare. The situation in which healthcare professionals work could be quite intense and stressful and they need the technology to assist them in their work. The designs should be simple, easy to use, assist efficient decision making, and effectively fulfil the most critical goals of the users.

Design with regulations

The overall user experience process followed to provide design solutions in healthcare could be similar to other domains. An organization could adopt a traditional or double diamond process that could suit their pattern of work. 

What sets apart is for the designers to strictly adhere to the usability standards like Ergonomics of human-system interaction (ISO 9241-11:2018), Medical devices — Part 1: Application of usability engineering to medical devices (IEC 62366-1:2015) and Medical electrical equipment - Part 1-6: General requirements for basic safety and essential performance - Collateral standard: Usability (EN 60601-1-6) when it comes to designing from digital applications to medical devices. 

The first standard Ergonomics of human-system interaction (ISO 9241-11:2018) explains each component in the definition of usability and assists in interpreting it correctly: “the extent to which a system, product or service can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use”. Similarly, the second and third standard focuses more on applying process like analysis, design, verification, and validation of usability while developing the medical devices which is related to patient safety.

Andreea Popescu in her article "The UX process for healthcare apps" (3), suggested that we should consider the internal processes at a human level like wage sanctions, loss of work, and/or legal actions along with standards followed while developing software and medical devices.

Design with care, responsibility, and patience

It is very important for each individual in the team (designer, developer, product manager, domain experts) need to work together to build the solutions. The design team should work towards building experiences that are empathic towards patients and their wellbeing. 

Chris Kiess has rightfully written in his article (4), as designers, we will need to carve out our own niche with design becoming a greater part of care delivery. We’ll move beyond designing a feature, a product, or even a singular experience. We need to change our approach and begin designing systems of care.

It is also critical for the designers to practice responsible design and their solutions should be derived from intense user experience research and closely understanding the core problems. The situation for designers could be difficult and frustrating while conducting research or validating the solutions due to various reasons as the healthcare sector could be very unpredictable. The designer should have a high level of patience and plan the overall research and user interactions smartly. 

One of the articles published in YUJ Designs (5) highlights the UX designers should practice responsible design and enable businesses, organisations, and healthcare professionals to use all the tools available to them effectively. It could be achieved by applying a data-driven design approach.

Q. What do you think about the user research activities in the post-pandemic world? Will technology play a role in that? 

The current unprecedented situation has bought many uncertainties across the globe and it has impacted the way user research is conducted. I believe the user experience field has well-developed research techniques that support various levels of research activities from in-person to remote. Researchers have been using various technological tools to support their research making it easier for eliciting meaningful insights and providing easy access for the team to take actionable decisions. 

Organization and Research Group Perspective:

Many companies and research groups have already modified the way they conduct research activities in the current situation. The difference could be the overall strategy in which the research could be conducted in the future. The overall budget could be closely reviewed which could lead to a reduction in the spending’s for the overall research activities. The dependency on research techniques like "unmoderated user testing", "diary writing", “remote user interviews” could increase in the coming days to control the overall budget spent on product research. 

The organisations could go into the extent of outsourcing some parts of the research and maintaining a small in-house research team. The organisations have already been opting for these services for assisting them in conducting research activities. The focus will shift more towards the optimised research delivering higher value to the organisation. 

A fine balance will be needed to be maintained between the lean approach in product-oriented research and a small agile research team for exploring opportunities that could bring far better value to the company. The lean research approach will help to maintain the current product in the market as well as a small agile research team could assist in breaking smaller grounds in the area of innovation within their respective market. It will have better chances of yielding a better return on investments for the organisations.

While most of the activities could be planned to be conducted remotely, there can be some unavoidable situations to conduct in-person user research. The testing medical devices, wearables, and the unique context of use could be some scenarios where researchers have to set in-person field studies for eliciting information and insights. 

One of the most noted independent user experience companies UX alliance has been researching in the area of "UX Safety Tips for in-person research" (8). The research suggests an innovative way of setting up user research labs, sanitisation of equipment, and steps to ensure the safety of the users and research teams to conduct successful research sessions in the current situation and post-pandemic world.  

Researcher and Designers Perspective:

We are going through one of the worst pandemic situations which could give rise to many knowns and unknowns. The post-pandemic world could bring change in the way we interact with each other, the environment of work, approach in which business is conducted, etc. 

This is a unique opportunity for the researchers to be in the center of change and guide the organisations to reposition their products and services to be more relevant to their users and market. 

Tom Hayes, UX researcher, UserZoom has written in "The role of UX research now and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic" (9) that user experience practitioners need to closely identify the change in user behaviour on how the user interacts with the product.

As researchers, we have a great responsibility to highlight the value of our research through effective strategy and efficient decision making. We have to be the torchbearers to guide the organisations through the unknown times. This could be possible through user-centered research with keen observations, constant insights, robust and proactive reporting.

References:

1. Why lives depend on design decisions – UX in healthcare - by Bansi Mehta.
2. Medical Device Usability: Highlights of European Regulations and Standards
3. The UX process for healthcare apps by Andreea Popescu
4. Healthcare UX: a journey just begun
5. Top UX challenges in healthcare industry
6. The third WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge: Medication Without Harm - by WHO
7. 5.2 million medical errors are happening in India annually: Dr Girdhar J. Gyani
8. Webinar on safety tips for in-person research by UX Alliance
9. The role of UX research now and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

Ask the Experts - Talk with Ganesh Gaikwad (Director, User Experience)

Ask The Experts

A new milestone, UXness has initiated a step to connect with experts and understand their thoughts on certain topics. Directly connecting with experts and hearing from their own words, doesn't it sound interesting? Yes it is. In this series, please welcome our first UX Experts panel - Ganesh Gaikwad (Director, User Experience). 

Expert Bio

Ganesh Gaikwad
Director User Experience 
Tata Consultancy Services 

Experienced Director Of User Experience with a demonstrated business impact in the IT products and services industry. Delivered software products and projects in multiple domains from concept to market. Loving hands-on design work and practicing design thinking. Holds Master of Design (M. Des.) in Product Design from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.  LinkedIn

 Usability Testing in pandemic & post pandemic world 

Q. You have a big team of designers working for multiple customers and projects, how this COVID situation has impacted the work? 

A. Lot of our projects were planned with onsite work components. Due to Covid19, people couldn't travel to customer locations and whoever was onsite, couldn't work at customer facilities. However, my organization facilitated the work from home to all employees at onsite and offshore locations. This helped ensuring uninterrupted delivery.

Q. The volume of projects and customers are always high with your team, how do you manage and ensure the right set of methods are being followed for given project? 

A. We have one of the largest team of designers in India and abroad with people at every level. Such a large team indeed needs formal methods, guidelines, templates and resources that they can use. We had invested in developing such accelerators that help our team members to quickly start producing. Once lead designers define the approach, the activities are streamlined with the methods and templates standardised and refined over the time. That said, I must say that every project, every.

Q. What do you see as the role of technology in conducting Usability Testing and other remote research? Where do you think it is creating the biggest impact? 

A. Technology has been crucial in conducting testing and research since long. In the current situation, it has become even more pivotal to carry out the UX testing as well as formative research activities. New tools are being budgeted for remote co-working and those are certainly adding value in this situation.

Q. Do you see any advantages and disadvantages of conducting Usability Testing remotely? 

A. I think the biggest advantage is going to be breadth of usability testing in terms of number of participants. Secondly, the budgets and timelines are perhaps going to be smaller as everyone by then is familiar to participate and conduct testing remotely. The usually very effective methods such as contextual inquiry and field visits are going to be used less. There are some projects where these are essential techniques. Formative user research may get limited due to the current situation.

Q. You might have faced the situation where the clients are not aware about design process ex. Usability Testing, in that case how do you create the awareness about that? 

A. Many customers do understand the value of design, it is then a matter of how effectively we can articulate. Walking them through case studies and demonstrating the process through a Proof of Concept helps. I feel it is a job of every designer to relate the design to business. Designing for the outcome by identifying the correct KPIs and how those KPI add to the RoI is essential. This helps people to understand the design as a whole and the process is then easy to communicate.

10 Essential UI Design Interview Questions

1. How do you estimate the timeline of your own design process?

 This question should reveal how effectively a designer works with deadlines and project timelines. The candidate should be able to tell you about estimation tools and techniques encountered during his or her design career. Ask candidates if they create their own estimated timelines, milestones and deadlines, or if they were provided by another team member.

It is more important to find out if a designer manages to meet these set timelines, milestones and deadlines, or if they negatively affect the creative process. Some estimation techniques are Function Point Analysis, Use Case Template and Relative Mass Valuation.

2. Can you describe your ideal work day as a UI designer?

By answering this question, a designer should reveal a lot about his or her preferences of processes, orders and setups. You should be able to find out how much of a team player the applicant is, and how much does s/he expect from other team members: Developers, UX designers, and Information Architects.

A good UI designer should mention how important it is to communicate with UX designers about changes in prototypes or wireframes. Another good sign is if the designer mentions keeping end-user goals in mind when designing each element, as well as how s/he is aware of any technical limitations.

3. What are your core areas of UI design expertise?

Any UI designer who has worked long enough on various, unique projects, will have developed areas of expertise, or at least, preferences.

The designer’s answers should revolve around preferred client types or around certain type of platforms: Designing websites, mobile apps, backend dashboards, for instance. Professional UI designers would also cover the journey itself, describing how they arrived at these areas of expertise and experience.

4. Can you describe an app with the worst ever user interface?

This is a kind of reverse psychology question. You might as well just ask, “What do you think a great user interface looks like?” But the trick is not to make the question too obvious so the prospective designer does not give a general answer.

By describing elements of the worst ever user interface, the designer illustrates his or her design values for such things as buttons, input boxes, labels, login screens, as well as shapes, sizes, positioning and colors of these elements. A professional UI designer should always give a detailed explanation of why a certain interface has no chance of pleasing the end-user.

5. How would you redesign a well known user interface?

This question should clarify how a designer thinks as the end-user. First of all, the designer has to identify the elements to be redesigned (colors, shapes, sizes, placement, for example), followed up by reasons, not choices, explaining why these elements require a redesign.

Finally, the most important part of this question should reveal the changes the designer would like to apply to the user interface. Again, backed up by reasons rather than choices, the designer needs to explain why the proposed changes would look better and how these changes would contribute better to the user experience.

6. What UX information you need to have before you start designing?

Every professional UI designer should have as much information as possible about the user experience (UX) and user journey that the team intends to create. This UX experience is usually planned out based on gathered data, including user surveying, usability testing, and so on.

So, the foundational information a UI designer needs before starting will revolve around the end-user needs and some business goals. It would also be wise to discover the designer’s reasoning behind any UX information s/he feels is necessary prior to commencing work on the project.

7. What do you think is the most intuitive user interface ever created?

Many design experts continue to argue over whether intuition-driven user interfaces are a myth. Those who are advocates say learning that the end-user describes your user interface as “intuitive” is the highest praise you will ever receive.

This is a thought provoking question for any UI designer and it will allow you to find out whether the designer also thinks it’s a myth or not. More importantly, if the designer does not believe it is a myth, what would she or he consider the most intuitive user interface created?

8. What are your thoughts about Google’s material design?

Google created material design as a visual language that synthesizes classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. This is a more specific than generic question, which should also be answered by a more specific answer.

Professional UI designers keeping their fingers on the pulse of the latest user interface updates and standards, will know a lot about material design: it’s principles, properties, environment, goals, and the like. Hearing the designer’s own thoughts should indicate that the candidate is not just following latest trends because it’s trendy.

9. Why do you think Sketch has gained such popularity around UI?

While just a few years ago Photoshop was the number-one choice for every designer, today things have changed. The majority of professional UI designers prefer to design interfaces using Sketch, which was developed specifically for user interface creation, but not for logos, illustrations, or anything else graphics-related.

Still, it is beneficial to hear why UI designers think Sketch has gained so much popularity in such a short time. Some of the features that Sketch is known for are 100 percent vector support, code-friendly designs, robust export features, customizable grid systems, and so on.

10. Can you tell me about a time you used UI microinteractions?

Ideally, this question should be answered by referring to a project where a designer used UI microinteractions to enhance the “feel” part of the “look and feel”.

Professional UI designers understand that a design can have beautifully designed features and elements, but if there is not enough attention to detail, the end-user might be put off. Therefore, employing UI microinteractions is a good way to take care of these little details.

References:
This article was originally published on Toptal.

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Email: jordan.lyons@toptal.com