All work is play.
Everything worth doing begins with an idea or an instinct. Don’t hold back when imagination strikes - Bark up the wrong tree, take that leap, solve that mystery. Be messy. Push your limits. Embrace the unexpected.
Rarely does a piece of clothing fit without adjustments. While working for Bone+Black in New York, I had the chance to see just how often the shape of a product changes, both literally and figuratively. Our firm had been conducting photoshoots for Eileen Fisher’s new Fall line, and we weren’t finding the impact we wanted from our test groups. It was time for a shift.
We knew what kind of experience we wanted to create: warmth, confidence, and a style that felt both deliberate and effortless. We knew our customers - professors, editors, psychotherapists, lawyers, administrators and professionals. What we were lacking was alignment. Our users couldn’t see themselves in the clothes, they could only see the garments.
We stopped photography, and started bringing our test groups into the studio. Their eyes became our cameras, and their live reactions proved more valuable than any lightbox reviews we could organize. Taking that human-centered approach, making the women who wear Eileen’s clothing our fulcrum, opened the door to real-time adjustments. Cuts were changed, materials swapped, and lines redrawn.
Refocusing on the customer journey had allowed us to more precisely deliver an experience that felt authentic to our customer. A human centered design approach allowed our customers’ perspectives and experiences to directly inform our campaign’s theme, and produced beautiful garments that felt as good to wear as they looked on camera.
Adjust as you go.
Design has the potential to alter the way someone interacts with their world, to be the physical connection to new experiences. When designing, testing and building the ROVA Pedestrian Assistant, it was critical to not only consider the experience of those who would be using our product every day, but to push ourselves to find the best solution even after we’d found one which might already seem sufficient.
CB Goodsell is the embodiment of the “empowered patient,” taking control of his health and his future by tackling his mobility challenges head-on. As an endurance athlete, CB was used to cycling 50 miles a day, kite-surfing, and exploring the great outdoors. When he became dependent upon mobility assistive equipment as a result of a degenerative condition, CB partnered with DDSTUDIO to find a new solution that would preserve his freedom while providing the support he needed.
Traditional walkers offered support, but weren’t a match for the active, outgoing CB. Walkers are fundamentally cumbersome and ergonomically inefficient. Through user research, we determined that the use of a walker further stigmatizes and hampers the lives of those in need of assistance. We needed to adapt, to push beyond the comfortably familiar and reach for a new solution.
It was important that we accommodate a natural walking gait and provide support when needed. Through user testing, we discovered that people actually used more than just the handle for stability—they just grab whatever is in front of them, so it would have to be rugged. On top of that, people need to transport objects through tight spaces in the home, so carrying capacity and a compact form factor were priorities.
After extensive prototyping and testing, we arrived at a truly consumer oriented mobility platform with the objective of encouraging our aging population and people with mobility challenges to enjoy an active social life. The sleek, attractive and convenient ROVA allows people to maintain their mobility, dignity and social calendar.
Don’t get comfortable.
Adventist Health, a system of over 300 hospitals nationwide, needed a way to track its revenue cycle and to visualize key areas of improvement. They had used data dashboards before, but had adhered to a rigid model of visualization that simply couldn’t keep up with the evolution and growth of their health network. To make a big impact on the quality of care Adventist Health could provide to its patients, we threw out the old rulebook and started fresh with a uniquely human centered approach.
Taking on this challenge required two key design phases: first, I needed to create a database solution which could track both financial and productivity metrics with extreme accuracy. Our solution would need to be integrated with their existing Health Information System (HIS) as well as with the reporting software offered by Huron (TIBCO Spotfire.) Second, I needed to find a way to communicate important findings and key performance indicators to non-technical leaders to facilitate informed decision making.
I began by conducting user research with existing consultant and health-provider teams. These were the experts, the people who had been in the trenches providing healthcare to thousands of patients each day. I asked them about what had worked in the past, and what the pain-points had been while using their existing system. Speed and usability were a top priority in the fast-paced emergency department. Filtering and asset management were of utmost importance to the staff monitoring employee performance. Results in hand, we got to work on our new toolkit.
With so much change, I focused on making sure our key stakeholders were comfortable with our iterative process, and included them every step of the way. Working directly with Adventist’s executive leadership, I provided visual solutions which translated their massive data lack into actionable metrics. As they began to explore the features of our solution, their fear quickly turned to excitement and curiosity. By breaking from tradition and leveraging the insights revealed by my new approach, Adventist Health was able to streamline its financial system and offer better care to its patients.
Impact > Tradition
The first step to innovation will always be learning what has come before. The best creators are eternal students, willing to explore the solutions offered by history and their surroundings with an open mind. That curiosity is what drives novel ideas, and what ultimately leads to truly imaginative solutions. So how do you “teach” people how to be more creative? What are the barriers that can prevent students from feeling free to suggest new ideas? I sought to answer this question by partnering with Learn 4 Life, a network of public charters in Southern California, to explore the possibilities offered by human centered design in education.
Our partnership had several goals, but the most important among them was to create a model for curriculum and materials which prioritized individual learning outcomes. Each student learns at a different pace, so my solution needed to add value across a broad spectrum of users. I followed my own advice, and hit the books. In all my work it’s important for me to conduct extensive research on the current trends and methodologies so that I can understand the context from which I’ll be working from. Context provides the bedrock for creativity, and nowhere has that felt more apparent to me than the classroom. My next phase was user research, conducting in-person interviews with current students and recent alumni. Eventually we decided on a custom student portal which would allow students to access existing tools, while providing a venue for new additions in the future.
To ensure usability, I integrated the existing tools that students loved to use— Google Classroom, Kami, and Blackboard. Creating a single online portal with SSO support allowed students to seamlessly access each of these platforms, and boosted teacher engagement by giving them direct ownership of their digital classrooms. Each was free to personalize their classroom experience, complete with visuals, materials, and GetTogether boards. I conducted training workshops for faculty, and onboarding sessions for students, so that every kind of user felt comfortable in the new system.
By the end of my four-year partnership with Learn 4 Life, our student success metrics were trending a full letter-grade higher than they had before the implementation of the new portal system. Students reported feeling more engaged, and our hybrid-model of remote education was producing outcomes 34% better than before the change. A resounding success for a human centered design approach in the classroom, but most importantly for the students and staff who continue to utilize our portal solution today.
