People-centered Design

Delivering radiation therapy

Whose experience? From what Perspective?

The use of radiation to treat cancer is long- and well-established and yet there is still so much more to be done to bring the treatment to more people and more effectively.

Also, the treatment of cancer in general (and within that the use of radiation therapy) is a kind of test bed for ideas on people-centred design … user experiences, user interfaces, artificial intelligence, and more.

Maybe the first challenge comes from the number of different people involved. When we talk of the user experience of radiation therapy (or chemotherapy, or oncology in general) there is that thorny question of ‘which user are we referring to?’ Do we mean the patient and their family, or the doctor (oncologist) responsible for treating them? Or the therapists who will deliver the treatment, or the medical physicists who will develop and / or validate the treatment plan and ensure the machines are running safely.

Motion management in Radiotherapy

This is another good example of how having the data is only the starting point. Presenting the user with the relevant data in a way which is safe and usable is a much deeper design problem that is usually appreciated.

Racing data

Kevin Richardson (Infragistics) gave a talk at UCDUK15 about the design of data presentation for motor bike racing, which provided a great example of how having the data is only the starting point of the design process.

Medical Equipment

A group with doctors alone on a new piece of medical equipment became very focused on the attractiveness of the technology and its message of innovation, but when joined by nurses, the doctors were quick to recognise that they would barely interact with the equipment.

GE Digital Power

In creating digital HMI for a power plant, it is easy to find constraints pulling in different directions – towards simplification of the HMI and the use of fewer, smaller screens, versus the presentation of more data across more, larger screens. Either is a possible experience that can be designed for, but the whole team needs to know which experience they are aiming for.

Three-ring Binders

Before being engaged on innovation in 3-ring binders, qualitative surveys had found that the snap of the three rings was not a problem for users and we were directed to look for innovation elsewhere.

Zyliss Kitchen Gadgets

Making a new family of kitchen gadgets could not just be about an easy grip … observational research in people’s homes while they were cooking highlighted the role of family and cooking together (with children joining in especially). And, of course, the inevitable need to make clean up fast. Innovations that resulted from these insights included a salad spinner with an integral brake and a potato masher with no enclosed spaces to trap potato.

Look, Listen, Try, Feel

Which People?

Making things better?

Don’t write interview guides

Interviewing Users

Experience is infinite