Rolling merrily along

The intranet redesign project progresses. I’ve drafted wireframes for the main pages of the new tabbed homepage (home, employee, patient care, support services, news, regions, about peacehealth), with functionality and content areas determined by the user data collected from surveys and card sorts. Still more user research to be done.

I’m currently trying to identify executive level stakeholders for the patient care areas, finishing up the taxonomy recommnedations based off of the card sort data, and documenting the IA with a formal Design Document.

The redesign project for the intranet site is now moving into the “working with the consultants” phase. They’ve been signed on and we’re doing some meetings with them next week in Bellevue.

Current Work

Let’s see.  The S10 (aka Morgue) app is nearing completion – actually it’s pretty much done, we’re just waiting on the Desktop reps to figure out the NT groups so that users can sign on and start using this app.  The Org Health Survey is proceeding – should be able to start working with some users soon to see how they actually interact with the existing survey tool.  Patient Connection is heating up.  We now have v11 installed and it’s ready to go live on 9/22 – unfortunately before we can do any user testing.  But we’re still going to do user testing and apply any changes to the app while it’s live.  These will for the most part be small, incremental changes that won’t warrant a whole rollout or anything major like that, so it should be OK.

Looks like I’m going to be attached to a couple major projects coming up:  A redesign of our internet site, and one of our intranet.  Both of these will take a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to helping design a task-driven, user data supported site.  It should be a big improvement!

The new hospital – RiverBend – is now open.  I was there to help during its opening and worked a couple different support desks, answering calls and logging them into an issue tracker.  Not very challenging work, but it felt good to be part of the effort.  It’s a very impressive hospital.

Hospitalist App, Post Eval, S10

Began working on a new app for hospitalists, but during the preliminary scope meeting it was discovered that what the customers need may be better accomplished with a report generated by a different team.  Now I need to wait until it’s determined whether or not that team can really fill all the customer’s needs.  If not then the project will come back to my team.

Had my first evaluation yesterday and it went really well.  I received high marks for my work in all categories (productivity, team contribution, customer satisfaction, adherence to core values, and job function/team skills), so that was gratifying.  Got good feedback from my manager and was able to give him my views on the challenges currently facing our team, as well as what my professional development goals are for the next year.  After working here for a little over a year I can say that I really love my job, the kind of work I do, and the environment I’m working in.  I really feel like I’m making a positive difference.

The S10 app is being coded and will hopefully be available for viewing sometime in the next couple of weeks.  Went through another design iteration on the UI screens, simplifying the entry screens and consolidating fields that were repeated across various forms.  The result should be a more efficient and usable interface for the S10 customers.  Can’t wait to test the UI with the customers once it’s fully coded.

I also continue to be consulted for various projects including FAQs, Help Pages, Intranet and Internet content, layout and best practices.  Enough to keep me busy!

Conversations

I was just thinking about how much of my job consists of communicating.  I’m always talking, via email, in person, or on the phone, with customers, developers, content owners, UX practioners, etc.  So much of what I do comes down to how effective I can be in getting across, and understanding, so many various concepts.  A lot of my work is done in isolation, the thinking, studying, tinkering, iterative design process – but then I have to get all that across to others, as well as actively listen to what they’re trying to get across.

It seems to me that one big key to good design is being able to communicate well during all phases of development, until what you end up with is intuitive, useful, and effective because it can “communicate” its functions effortlessly.

UX Intensive

I’m heading to SF next week for Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive!  I’m really looking forward to it.  They set up a social networking site that has been fun to participate in.  It’s a great way to get the workshop participants involved with one another before we meet in person.  We won’t be total strangers….which is interesting in its own right.  Currently we’re just virtual, our personas meeting one another via pictures, the written word, YouTube videos, etc.  Pretty cool, but also kinda weird and post-modern.  Our first impressions are being formed before we meet.  We are in a time and place where it may become necessary to differentiate between first impressions online and in person.  Maybe the distance between those impressions will become more and more important and telling as we continue to evolve in the digital realm.

Hello from Libraryland!

I’m Miguel Ramos.  My colleague Jon Dillon and I are part of the Usability and Design Team at Western Washington University and have started this blog as a way of sharing and discussing usability resources and ideas.