If there's one thing I love more than learning, it's sharing what I've learned.
Periodically, I'm given the opportunity to run my mouth in front of people. Whether it's a conference presentation, podcast, article or white paper, people have found value in the wisdom I have to share. If you'd like me to do an article or presentation for your team, drop me a line sometime.
Design and Product in the Age of AI
After our popular UXPA Boston panel, I contributed to this article by Rob Gifford summarizing the highlights.
Documentation Burden: Receiving the Ideal Note
While the ability to create an ideal clinical note is obviously important to the delivery of healthcare, equally essential to the process is the ability for other providers and systems — as well as the clinician's future self — to use those historical notes to understand the patient's history and inform future care decisions.
Reducing EHR-driven documentation burdens via the Ideal Note
Eliminating the documentation challenges that contribute to clinician burnout requires coordinated effort from across the healthcare continuum.
Using Object Oriented UX in user research — it can be done!
In this article for the athenahealth blog, I describe the process I used to help our Behavioral Health designers determine the appropriate structure for treatment plans. This was validated and adjusted with the help of our Behavioral Health user group.
Storytelling as a UX Superpower
Stories are a fundamentally human way to connect, and are critical for moving meaningful work forward. Understanding the type and structure of the story you're telling is a secret to success.
The lean research memo
In this article, I lay out a structure and format for light-weight, yet comprehensive, research findings. This process played a key role in helping my research live long past the time it was completed.
Increase your design influence by understanding your organization's decision-making style
In this post for athenahealth Design's Medium publication, I share a model called the Competing Values Framework (Cameron & Quinn, 2011) to help designers diagnose and navigate the different cultures we have to work within, and increase their influence within those cultures.
Creating a sustainable strategy for prioritizing product-wide design debt
In this article, I lay out the approach I helped Collector create for diagnosing, cataloging and managing UX Debt throughout the product.
Maintaining team alignment with experience briefs
Ah, the creative brief. At once the bane of the creative's tortured existence and a North Star to guide teams along the path to delivering something great. Enter the short-form creative brief. Comprised of a few short sections and no more than a page or two long, the brief helps center teams around a concise, brief vision for what they're trying to create.
The Politics of Design Systems: Keeping Stakeholders and Team Members Invested through the Process.
Design systems require significant organizational effort. Its champions can follow these practical tips to gain buy-in and create a clear vision for its future.
Empathy in the Enterprise: Conferences as a Research Venue
Still one of my favorite research methods, conferences can be an especially fruitful source of user feedback and discovery work, if you plan carefully and leave some room for improvisation in your research plan.
On conferences as a research venue
Research at conferences can be a terrific source of information about the people who use your products. At a conference, you get access to many different types of people involved in the behavior you want to learn about, including some types of people you may have known nothing about if you were doing a study with a standard recruit.
Inside Axure: Transitioning a team from comps to interactive prototypes
I shared lessons learned from working with designers at Harvard Business Review to move away from wide-screen comps to interactive and adaptive Axure prototypes.
Design's Role in the Age of AI
At the UXPA Boston conference, I was on a panel with three folks from athena's Product and Design team to share our experiences using AI in our daily work.
Tackling the Beast of EHR Complexity with OOUX
The domain of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) is arguably one of the most complex on the planet. I presented with Liza Richardson, Clinical Content Senior Manager, to showcase the ways we used (and adapted!) the OOUX process through a handful of high-visibility projects.
Chicago Camps Winter: Practical Design Strategy
In this presentation, I share the process we went through to arrive at a successful, human-centered product vision and roadmap for Ambulatory Surgical Centers, as well as some principles to keep in mind when co-designing product strategy.
Your Brain and Your Next Job
In this talk with Russ Unger of Chicago Camps, I talk about navigating a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis and how I determined the best direction for my career from there. Folks will find guidance for reflecting on your career to figure out the job that best fits you.
Practical Design Strategy: Creating a Human Centered Roadmap for Ambulatory Surgical Centers
In this presentation for the annual UXPA Boston conference, I laid out a series of principles for practical design strategy, told through the lens of my work with teams at athenaClinicals defining a product for Ambulatory Surgical Centers.
What is Wrong with Hiring: Finding Your Own Path
In this episode, Laura Klein talks with Dani Nordin, a Product Design Architect at Athenahealth, about what happens when you decide you need to structure your own role. She wants you to know that deciding you don't want to be a manager isn't a personal failing!
Increasing design influence by adapting your voice to your organization's decision-making style
Simply understanding what your product's users are dealing with isn't enough. To make truly great products, you need to understand how people, organizations, systems and content play together. In this presentation, we'll focus on some ways to help understand the organizational context you're working within, and to adjust your approach to increase your success within those organizations.
Snackwalls Podcast: Putting in the Work
Dani has found that finding diverse talent is possible if you put in sufficient effort. Recently she created a role canvas to define the ideal candidate for an open position. Then she worked on finding people with the skills, experience, and mindset that matched this role.
Storytelling as a UX Superpower
Stories are a fundamentally human way to connect, and are critical for moving meaningful work forward. Understanding the type and structure of the story you're telling is a secret to success.
Mapping Medication Workflows to build cross-product alignment
In this case study, Dani Nordin and Janna Dupree, of athenahealth and Nuance, discuss how they used cross-product research and experience mapping to bring alignment to teams across two flagship product lines.
UX Strat Podcast: On Experience Mapping
I spoke with the head of the UX Strat Conference about using experience maps to build team alignment across disconnected touchpoints, as a prelude to my talk at the annual conference in 2019.
Mapping complex workflows to gain cross-product alignment
In this case study, Dani Nordin and Janna Dupree, of athenahealth and Nuance, discuss how they used cross-product research and experience mapping to bring alignment to teams across two flagship product lines.
The Politics of Design Systems
In this session, I make the case that creating a company-wide design system is an organizational change effort, and provide practical tips and guidance for how you can prevent your efforts from getting derailed.
Data-driven design systems
In this presentation, me and Salem Ghoweri, principal front-end architect at Pegasystems, take a deep dive into how we're creating a comprehensive design system that includes documentation for developers, designers and other members of the project team.
Documenting Design Patterns for Agile Teams
In this session, I describe the process we worked on at Harvard Business Review to document our existing design patterns and create a working set of elements that allow both for rapid iteration of design prototypes and implementation of templates in code.
Lean, Collaborative Usability Testing
In this session, I outline the process I first developed at Harvard Business to bring user-centered design practices into an Agile product team. You'll learn techniques to rapidly benchmark your user experience, test and report findings, and align stakeholders on critical usability issues.
Engaging UX and Design Drupal Contributors
In this core conversation at Drupalcon, I discuss the need to include more designers and UX contributors in the Drupal project, and facilitate an open discussion with members of the community.
Talking Drupal #61
In this podcast, I jam out with the guys from Talking Drupal on a variety of topics, including design leadership.
Empathy in the Enterprise
In this session for Acquia Engage, I talk about the different types of empathy, and how they come together in enterprise settings.
Learning UX Fundamentals
In this 3-hour video course for O'Reilly, I break down the fundamentals of UX design, from basic human factors principles to conducting effective research to information architecture and design. This course is great for absolute beginners to the UX field.
Designing with Empathy
In this 3-hour video course for O'Reilly, I take a deep dive into cultivating empathy in the design process. In addition to the basics of user research, I cover different ways to present research findings, discuss case studies, and talk about how to bring empathy for users throughout your organization. This course is best for people who have been in the field for a while, but want to better understand how to bring user insight into their work on a regular cadence.
Drupal for Designers
This book is a compilation of three short guides — Planning Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers — plus exclusive "director's material." If you're familiar with HTML and CSS, but struggling with Drupal's learning curve, this is the book you've been looking for. Note: this book is focused on Drupal 7.
