The (Happy?) Marriage of Experience Strategy and Marketing
UXPA Boston Conference Talk 2022
Contemporary marketing plays an important role in shaping people’s perception and society itself, and the tools available to marketers to influence human behavior wield a lot of power. This is much too important to not interject thinking that is centered around what is good for people, retaining their agency and choice, and meeting marketing goals without user manipulation.
Boost Your Emotional Intelligence to Move from Good UX to Great
O'Reilly book I Podcast Interview I UXPA Boston Conference Talk 2021 I Panel Discussion Big Design Conference 2021
The industry shift towards human-centered design and a democratized design process has encouraged UX practitioners to optimize results by directly involving end users and stakeholders in the design process. But humans are complex and certain interpersonal skills don't come naturally to everyone. Navigating diverse priorities, opinions and personalities is difficult. A typical design education doesn't prepare UX practitioners for the challenges of a role that sits at the intersection of many other disciplines. The best UX professionals I've met have one thing in common — Emotional Intelligence.
Is Your Health Plan Customer Experience Ready for CAA's No Surprise Act?
Merge WhitePaper
This whitepaper outlines the sweeping changes coming to the American Health plan landscape and provides direction on how to advocate for the member experience while implementing them.
Podcast: Aligning design and business needs in unique ways
Users First - a UX Design Podcast
In this interview with Alessio Ferracuti we cover a range of topics including: How we can improve design for newcomers, how to work in collaboration with clients, while aligning business needs and design, the role of a strategist, and my favorite methodology to define users journeys.
Article: Uncharted Waters: Why It’s Important to Design for Newcomers
UX Booth Nov 2020
The "Newcomer" design lens can help make experiences for all users new to a product or service. In this article, read about why this is important and how designers, researchers, CX professionals and innovators can apply it in their work.
Webinar: Design and Deliver More Innovative Solutions with a Holistic Understanding of the Chronic Health Experience
CHXD Sept 2020
The Chronic Health Experience Map represents a human-centered architecture of the health ecosystem for someone managing a chronic condition. It illustrates common health related events so designers and innovators can build empathy for the health seeker’s experiences at different points on their journey and design more meaningful solutions that build value and improve health outcomes.
Talk: Go with the flow: Using Service Design to architect an oncology experience
UX HealthCare Conference, 2020
A team at Mad*Pow used Service Design approaches with a local cancer center to inform the architecture of their new oncology department. Using participatory approaches, we arrived at concepts that would meet the needs of the patients, caregivers, health care providers and support staff, while deeply empathizing with their situations. With clever use of “on stage” and “off stage” spaces, and a deep understanding of radiation oncology and medical oncology, the flow of people through the space seamlessly aligned with the experienced healthcare journey.
Article: Rapid Service Design Adaptations for COVID-19
LinkedIn, 2020
What would a Service Designer cum Business Designer do when faced with store closures, staff layoffs and an uncertain future cause by a pandemic?
Panel: The Information Architecture Element in Practice
World IA Day, Boston, 2020
In this panel discussion, I brought a Service Designer's perspective in using information architecture in my work.
Clinical Decision Support & AI User Interface Design (Panel Discussion)
IDSA's Medical Design Deep Dive, Oct 2019
Enjoyed this panel at IDSA's Medical Design Deep Dive 2019 on designing Intelligence augmentation systems for clinical decision support. We also chatted about software as medical device and how CDS can be integrated into routine workflow. Glad to be in the company of Jeff Hersch and Mike Rayo, both leaders in this field!
Why it's Important to Design for Newcomers
Boston UXPA 2018 I Center for Health Experience Design 2019 I Big Design Conference 2020
Design professionals are used to viewing UX through various universal design lenses — users on mobile devices, users with physical and cognitive impairments, users with limited technological use — but are we missing an important lens? Just as the designing for accessibility lens makes the experience better for all users, designing for “newcomer”s needs can improve experiences for all users.
As designers, we rely heavily on users’ mental models formed by their own perceptions and by past experiences. But what if an experience is entirely new to them? What if they’re an “absolute first-time user” — a “newcomer”?
As designers, we rely heavily on users’ mental models formed by their own perceptions and by past experiences. But what if an experience is entirely new to them? What if they’re an “absolute first-time user” — a “newcomer”?
From Ideation to Implementation: Developing your Own Design Methodology
Boston UXPA Conference 2019 I Center for Health Experience Design 2019
It’s scary to step out of the circle of tried-and-true tools, processes, and methodologies. But doing so can help you become a better designer. If you’ve ever thought “There has to be a better way!” this talk will empower you to start building or adapting tools and processes for yourself. It will help you see the value of flexible thinking and open-mindedness. And It will encourage you to grow in your career by becoming a thought leader.
Archetypes as Enablers of Personalization in Design
WeWa Life & CHXD 2018 Webinar
Attitudes and personality traits strongly affect actions taken to track and improve health. An in-depth understanding of patient archetypes can be applied to first acknowledge different personality traits, and secondly design in a way that meets unique needs. Learn why personas that are grounded in behavior attributes are more helpful than demographics when making design decisions.
MPACT Workshop
Lavacon Conference 2017 I Health Experience Design Conference 2019
MPACT is a persona-building framework for anyone who wants to use an understanding of human behavior and the power of play to design better products and services. MPACT takes a facilitator and a team of diverse stakeholders on a step-by-step journey, from user research to project objectives to a mutually agreed-upon design direction. MPACT workshops provide hands on learning to get teams up and running using the framework.
Agile Behavior-based Personas for Better Designs
Boston CHI 2018 I Center for Health Experience Design 2018 I Innovation Learning Network 2018 I UXPA New Hampshire 2019
MPACT is a persona-building framework for anyone who wants to use an understanding of human behavior and the power of play to design better products and services. MPACT takes a facilitator and a team of diverse stakeholders on a step-by-step journey, from user research to project objectives to a mutually agreed-upon design direction.
Participatory Design Workshop
HIMMS NorCal 2017 ePatient Summit I Health Experience Design Conference 2018
During the workshops participants learned about what participatory design is and how it can be used effectively while designing in a healthcare setting. Participatory design is an approach to design strategy that brings customers into the heart of the design process. Attendees were introduced to basic participatory service design methods, including fundamental tools and exercises, and learn how to choose activities, frame design prompts, and facilitate design activities to generate the best results
Mad*Pow Service Design Jam
May 2017 I November 2018
Organized and facilitated the Mad*Pow Service Design Jam — a hackathon-like event to help participants understand the general principles of service design — complemented by principles related to process design, organizational design, information design, and technology design. Photos on Facebook
The 2018 jam was held in partnership with Mad*Pow's Center for Health Experience Design, Ironworkers Union and City of Boston. Teams worked on the challenge: Design a solution that addresses opioid abuse in the workplace, developing service solutions and rapid prototypes over 1.5 days.
The 2017 jam explored affordable housing and it’s potential as a channel for developing personal financial security for low-income populations.
The 2018 jam was held in partnership with Mad*Pow's Center for Health Experience Design, Ironworkers Union and City of Boston. Teams worked on the challenge: Design a solution that addresses opioid abuse in the workplace, developing service solutions and rapid prototypes over 1.5 days.
The 2017 jam explored affordable housing and it’s potential as a channel for developing personal financial security for low-income populations.
Agile Persona Construction Toolkit (MPACT)
Launched in 2017
We created MPACT to make the persona creation process agile and customizable to project goals. MPACT is a structured framework that brings 3-6 diverse stakeholders together to understand the behavior of their audience and collaboratively develop a plan to design for them. A senior team of Mad*Pow researchers, designers, and strategists developed The MPACT methodology, using learnings from hundreds of hours of behavioral research in the health and finance space.
Journey Mapping Workshop
Health Experience Refactored 2017
A four hour workshop on how journey maps can help collaborate to define a vision, diagram the story of the solution, compare the solution to competitors’ offerings, and evaluate the impact of change. We used the scenario of receiving an Explanation of Benefits for health insurance in order to introduce participants to service design methodologies and systems thinking.
Yielding Powerful Insights Through Relationship Mapping
Published on UX Planet 2017
We developed this method to use Relationship mapping as a collaborative tool to capture powerful stories during discovery sessions. By providing participants with a tangible way to aid discussion, it helps researchers and strategists accomplish three main goals: Determine linkages between actors in a system, Show influence of the actors involved, Uncover the nature of these interactions, such as frequency, topics, mode, etc.