Eric Boggs

If you haven’t checked it out, please stop over and Chuck and I’s site – www.wecallitboost.com.  We are designing an app to help families coordinating caregiving tasks.  A large part of caregiving is staying on top of everything that needs to happen, both for the care receiver and the care giver.  In a typically stressful environment, family caregivers may tend to become isolated and retract from getting the help they need and deserve.  We’re here to help them get the support they need from their network, and to make that coordination as easy as possible.  One way we are doing that is through automated SMS sign-up and confirmation.

This past week, we began piloting, with Chuck and I as the system.   Why pilot you may ask?  To make sure we get the system interaction right.  And in a very cost effective and fun manner, we learned a lot about how to improve the initial interaction model.  Six actual caregivers posing as care helpers received texts regarding activity “asks” such as taking Grandma to PT, visiting, or buying her a sweater.  They then had to respond “y” or “n” and could check task details by following a link to a hosted image page of the fake task.  After accepting (or declining), we sent confirmation texts 24 hours in advance of the supposed task due date to reconfirm their commitment.  The day after, we sent texts asking for updates that would be posted to the system for all to see (imagining use of the actual app by a core team of helpers).

For one, we learned that we will need to plan for uncertainly – helpers will invariably want more information, and there has to be a text option for “?”, at this point, which will likely direct a text to the primary caregiver to determine how to answer.

The goal is to take as much of the matching and explanation responsibility OFF the caregiver, which we intend to do through smart hints when creating tasks, and well as a redesigned message that may include key components of the task in addition to the name.

Chuck and I continue to work on wire iterations for Careshare.  The latest version provoked a conversation on order and structure with Professor Franks.  As you can tell, the first one is a bit floating – and that led to it feeling somewhat off, but at first I wasn’t sure what to do.  After working through some of the issues with Professor Franks, I realized there were some simple modifications I could do to have the site begin to sing. I include below a sample page from before and after.

1)Use a grid system.  I was trying to line up everything more or less by eye, which is not an easy or accurate way to go.  I in fact imported a layer into Illustrator of bars, 30 pixels wide, and spaced 30 pixels apart.  Then, I made sure all elements lined up with edges of the grid.

2)Don’t use fully “black” fonts.  I was using them all over the page, and they are a bit harsh.  Lightening them up even a little bit makes them softer on the eyes, which is certainly part of what we (and any site or app) should do.

3)Decide on a color scheme – use kuler (a tool provided by Adobe) or something similar to give you ideas on colors that work well together and fit your overall vision for the site. In terms of color, we wanted to include a warm and inviting, yet airy feel.  We felt good about the turquoise and the red-orange, but needed other colors to complement them better.  Kuler helped us find colors that did so.

4)Keep equal spacing and padding around all elements.  For example, if there are 15 pixels of space between font above a line and the line itself, there should be the same amount of space below.

5)Stay aligned the same way throughout the site.  In the first example below, the first two sections are left aligned and the final, centered.  This can through a user off.

6)Have a different color for clickable links, and use that throughout.  You can see ours is a dark gray – while subtle, we think that users will intuitively pick this up.

Next steps for us include more iteration, testing, and adding in “orphaned” pages.  In the past week, we have conducted clickable prototype testing with 2 users, and over the next week we hope to do the same with 2-3 additional caregivers to continue to get feedback on how to improve.

After

As always, the readings were the inspiration for tonight’s post.  I was particularly affected by Don Schon’s writings around reflective “practitioning”, as well as Cross, who both indicate that a designerly problem solving process is both reflective and iterative in nature.

The relationship between knowledge, strategy, and creativity is a fluid one, which is hard to demonstrate in a static 2 dimension artifact – however try I must!  To me, creativity is really a combination of intuitioned problem framing (what “feels” like the right way to look at a problem), verbal provocation, and making/modeling.  These things constantly are happening inside my head as I work toward ill defined problem solution “jousts” around our Care Share product.  While I may have many creative ideas, that actual strategy that I choose to employ is first cleared by my existing knowledge – of what worked before, or what definitely did not work.  Creative strategies then must go through a filter of logic at some point.

After trying it out, I have to review what I’ve done and see if it “worked” which for me, is a rough sense of it.  As the sensemaking article explains, generally in design we are looking to understand if the solution leaves the problem at least in a more desired state then before; always with clues on how to proceed in subsequent iterations.

The prompt for this presentation was “argue for technology’s role in society.” The inspiration for this keynote came from the first set of readings, listed here, as well as my own thoughts.

Technology’s role is to help us humans achieve our wants and needs.  It is purporting to do so with its benevolent march into ubiquity.  But technology can help us achieve so much more than heating up potatoes (yes, my diet has taken a hit as I spend more and more time at AC4D!).

We need to think about how to make this transfer most effective and meaningful.  I conclude that successful interactions of these new products will be judged through how well they can play nicely with our existing worlds; namely, if they are equitable, pleasant, and engaging based on culture and current context.  If they can be so, we can share a dialogue – specifically, we can grow to trust and value their contributions to our lives over time.

See the presentation.