Interaction Design

As part of athenahealth’s efforts to showcase the advantages of its network-enabled healthcare IT service over stand-alone software, altr was brought in to work with the athena team to create a simple performance assessment and optimization tool.

There's no such thing as an average user.

People are now more willing to share personal health information online. What’s the responsibility of digital marketers in the health and pharmaceutical space?

To build better products, development teams need to integrate the hardware and software development processes. The design thinking mindset could provide the means to enable this reunification.

Only connected devices that connect deeply with their users will have staying power. How do you strategize interaction design for IoT products customers will love?

How much agency should a machine be allowed? For both medical devices and cars, the potential to save lives is very real. But the consequences of things going wrong could be catastrophic.

Sometimes the simplest designs are the most difficult to get right. Here's how we approach the design of a low-information-density user interface.

In many areas of healthcare where AI has great potential, use of the technology is still in its infancy. In these realms where it’s slower to catch on, a common obstacle to adoption is lack of trust.

A few months ago, we shared our thoughts on three UX trends reshaping medical product design. Here are a few suggestions on how to incorporate those trends into your medical device UX design efforts.

Several years ago, someone gifted me with Twine, an Internet-connected 2.5 square box that can be “programmed” in plain English, without needing to know how to code.

At Delve, we believe that mobile, voice, and “interfaceless” applications should consider accessibility before the first line of code is written or the first wireframe is constructed.

Creating a connected device is a bit like making a movie: it has a beginning, middle, and end; challenges to overcome; and an ultimately victorious hero, the user.

There are an infinite number of ways to write the software for an embedded system. How do you decide which way is the right way?

In a world of “ubiquitous computing,” how might technology communicate information without hijacking a person’s attention?

You've grasped the basic anatomy of an IoT device, identified how you’ll connect with and begin to communicate with the cloud, and selected a cloud service provider. It’s time to get prototyping.

Make sure your provider uses a well-known and secure method for communicating.

Delve has long been a go-to shop for creating rugged, mission-critical products. The communications equipment required for IoT devices adds an extra twist.

Why should you invest in a usable user interface?

Connecting a device to the Internet adds layers of complexity.

Where do you fall on the Usability Maturity Ladder?

Today’s users of medical devices expect a consumer-level experience. How can medtech firms make the shift?

A bottom-line approach drives meaningless products. Here are four guidelines for making meaningful wearable tech.

In art, an unfinished work remains unfinished. In design, an unfinished work opens up possibilities for the user.

Digital-physical workflows help us envision what needs to happen in the digital world and the physical world, as well as where the two need to work together.

Regardless of what you're designing, the options you present to users should be simple and straightforward.

Adding a sensor or touchscreen to just about any product has become cheap and straightforward. But it doesn't always make things better for the user.

The acceleration of tech, and especially the mobile revolution, has deeply impacted both the consumer and medical device industries.

Users often go rogue, using products in ways they weren’t designed to be used. Design for misuse is a way to counteract this.

Interaction designers have spent decades figuring out the best way to build an interface from scratch. A lot of what we know translates well to smart products.

Given the maze of use cases and associated certifications, designing an IoT medical device may take longer and cost more than you expect. Take the shortest path to a completed project by considering four factors.

Fresh from our webinar, AI & Medical Device Development, we'd like to share a few takeaways from the discussion.

Touchscreens are now tactile. This may have big implications for medical devices and vehicle infotainment systems, where safety and error-reduction are paramount.

Medical device manufacturers need to design for a new kind of user. This has big implications not just for the devices they design but also for how they do business.

While reviewing the early data from our ongoing research on trends in the medical device industry, three unexpected findings caught our eye.

Patients are becoming empowered consumers of healthcare. They bring to medical devices the high expectations formed from their experiences with highly intuitive consumer products—as well as greater risk.

We’ve been experimenting with a new methodology for designing medical devices with hardware/software interactions. Here’s what a new, holistic development process might look like.

Next-generation medical devices with hardware-software interactions need a new, holistic development methodology.

A coffee pod system without a plastic pod. Headphones that read your mind. A touch-sensitive prosthetic hand. Check out the biggest innovations to influence product design in 2022.

How to create a successful product – whether you're designing a product that's physical, digital, or somewhere in between.

A primer on what, how and when the discipline of human factors is used in the design and development of products.

We've been doing remote research since before COVID-19, but the pandemic gave given us a great opportunity to hone our craft.

Teach yourself to become a multilingual digital-physical product design practitioner using five simple strategies.

We have a team roaming the massive Las Vegas Convention Center today at the Consumer Electronics Show, better known as CES. We'll be adding to this blog post throughout the day as we find cool stuff to share.

Humans are drawn to anthropomorphic form in product design. Here's how industrial and interaction designers can use this as a tool.

I’d prefer to never say words Industrial Designer again.

Good mapping makes products easier and more intuitive to use. Done well, it can create a powerful connection between a product and its users.

Medical devices are commonly recalled due to usability issues that can be prevented with human factors plans and uFMEAs.

Nudge is a concept rooted in behavioral science that describes how minor changes in product design can markedly affect individual behavior.

The beginning of a new year is a great time for reflection – and what better to reflect on than the last year in design and innovation?

Our summer interns worked on a very cool project to make a Virtual Reality prototyping tool called PIE. They learned that making PIE isn't that easy.

Designing appliances increasingly involves and interaction design component. How do you integrate this skill into your development process effectively?

As more products become software-enabled, our notions of expected performance and life cycle are changing.

IoT makes sense for industrial applications where there are endless opportunities to monitor and automate.

Launching a restaurant is the ultimate personal exercise in user-centered design.

Slowing down and practicing mindfulness in design can lead to better products.

Julie Norvaisas from LinkedIn stopped by our offices to share tips on how they research User Experience to deliver the best products and services.

Fighting bugs, storms and heat, design camp provides the challenge of putting ideas into interconnected motion.

Consumers have access to a hodgepodge of information on brands that they never had access to before, which makes it tough to control the brand experience.

The Switch has a lot of great features, but the modular design leads to some clunky compromises. Ultimately, does it matter?

Design Thinking and Lean Startup are two approaches that can co-exist with some creativity and flexibility to create a better result.

Mapping user experiences and systems can help you create more delightful healthcare experiences.

Products designed for accessibility end up making life better for everyone.

Disney fosters a greater sense of fantasy by concealing the mechanisms of personalization.

When we look back on an experience, we craft a narrative based on memory and emotion and the sum of our experiences. The same is true of how we process our experiences with brands.

This presentation provides an overview of user experience design, its origins, some tools and processes and how the practice may evolve in the future.

We polled the office on favorite branded interactions and narrowed everyone’s nominations down to 15 brands who do it well. Here’s the list of brands and the interactions we consider to be successful.

There was a lot of talk about the Internet of Things this year at SXSW Interactive 2015. And yes, there were a lot of cool Internet-things.

Recent workplace deaths involving robotic arms are a new variant of the dangers that come with using powerful tools.

Our industrial design for the AmpStrip, a 24/7 heart rate and activity monitor, recently won a Gold Spark Award.

The worlds of physical and digital product design are on a collision course. Interaction designers should take note.

Connected devices too often rely on a "master operator" framework that ignores the wonderfully messy realities of family life.

Want a Sansa or an iPod? Sometimes getting to market first is better than making a better product.

Many SxSW Interactive talks pondered the future of connected devices. What we can address now and how we may bridge the user-experience gap for the future?

The more real something looks and feels, the more likely it is that you’ll receive actionable feedback to validate your design or inform your next iteration.

UX design is maturing and none too soon for the technology challenges and opportunities we face.

As the consumer-driven IoT culture, which moves fast and iterates frequently, meets the highly regulated med device industry, designers face new challenges.

At CES 2015, activity trackers were the bandwagon that many companies jumped on. Really? Isn't there something better to do with this technology?

Experience design is a field prepared to help healthcare workers effectively use new diagnostic technologies, but it is a pretty wicked problem to tackle.

No need to pick sides. Become a hybrid designer instead.

How might Leonardo da Vinci operate as a UX designer in the year 2014? I sent him a time machine and asked him.

We recently changed the name of our user interface design team to Interaction Design. The latter encompasses the dynamics of a user’s interaction with a system — including the user’s perceptual, cognitive, and physical interaction with the system, as well as the system’s response to the user.

User interface design patents are more important than ever. Here are tips for designers on how to make the UI patent process work for you.