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When doing usability testing (see Discount Usability Testing) we tend to act like anthropologists, observing people using computers as if they were savages performing quaint native rituals. In a post in UXmatters, Jim Ross argues that we should also use the anthropological technique of participant observation: basically, going native. Or, in other words, trying to […]

On May 3, Steve Stack, Chair of the American Medical Association (and an emergency physician from Lexington, KY) gave a presentation on electronic health records (EHRs) to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The paper is worth a close read. He observes that physicians are technology early-adopters, but that there had to be Federal […]

Less is More —Mies van der Rohe In high school English class, many of my generation were forced to study a book about writing known as “Strunk and White.” Compared to many other books we were forced to read, it had many advantages. It was short. It was to-the-point. It was full of pithy sayings, […]

In a February 19 article in the New York Times,  Julie Creswell calls the healthcare IT portion of the 2009 stimulus bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009)  ‘a $19 billion government “giveaway”’ resulting from the lobbying of the big HIS vendors. One of the quotes in her article points out the usability limitations […]

Skeuomorphism has been around for a long time. Architects including Frank Lloyd Wright have eschewed it. Alan Cooper, known as one of the founding fathers of user interaction design for computer systems, decried it in the first edition of his classic text, About Face: Essentials of User Interaction Design. And more recently (~October 2012), people […]