Blog of Much Holding

I’M A BIG FAN OF PITCHMEN, THE REALITY SHOW, AND I NOTE WITH GREAT SADNESS THE PASSING OF BILLY MAYS THIS MORNING. HERE’S A FUNNY CLIP IN HIS MEMORY.

JOE: I worked on a project for the CDC for some time and I saw this in my newsfeed and thought it looked interesting...

In response to the growing need for understanding the usability of electronic healthcare records (EHRs), US company User Centric has launched the first syndicated user performance research designed to provide end-users with real data on the usability of EHR applications.

One of the key limiting factors to adoption now is usability. Up to now the focus for comparing EHRs has been on functionality, and CCHIT's expansive list of nearly 500 functions. Many of these functions do not apply to many practices or specialties. CCHIT evaluations make no comment on how "usable" these functions are across vendors. Neither CCHIT nor the governmental bodies has taken the lead on ensuring that the applications are usable by providers in the busy practice of medicine.

"This is the opportunity for those vendors who claim to be 'user friendly' or 'easy to use' to independently verify that claim against other vendors," says Gavin Lew, Founder and Managing Director. "User Centric's long history of expertise in user research and user interface analysis and design, position us strongly to measure and improve the customer experience with EHRs and EMRs."

There are many examples from industries outside of healthcare where functionally equivalent, mission-critical applications are reliably measured and compared.

"User Centric is uniquely positioned to provide this service as we are experts in human performance, and experts in user interface design," says Dr. Robert Schumacher, Managing Director. "For the first time health care purchasers will get to the heart of 'meaningful use' — objective, independent data based on actual use. Our research will not be based on a surveys or checklists. It is real performance measurement gathered from practicing clinicians using realistic data. Combined with CCHIT and KLAS data, healthcare purchasers can have a complete picture of function, opinion, and now usability of applications."

User Centric's syndicated research offering consists of employing state-of-the-art user research methods to measure efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. Clinical users, representative of the market, will perform tasks based on use cases drawn from ONCHIT. Criterion-based measures of learnability and usability will be collected.

Usability is highly correlated with adoption. Applications that are more usable stand a higher chance of success in the marketplace.

By Joseph Tartakoff


Last Thursday, Google announced that the size of its workforce had dropped for the first time in its 11-year history. But during the company's earnings call, CFO Patrick Pichette said it is still hiring in 'critical areas'. So what are those areas?

We perused Google's job listings to find out (it was no easy feat, mind you: the company, the leader in search, offers no good way to do advanced searches of its openings). Seventy percent of the company's 185 job openings in the United States are in software engineering and engineering operations - hardly a big shocker. But Google is also still hiring in some support areas. For instance, it has two openings for its employee child-development program (one for a teacher and another for an operations manager). In the ad for the operations manager, Google says it is "expanding its employee child-development program by opening a high-quality center in the Mountain View area." (The search giant is also looking for managers for its shuttle-bus system and food-services supply chain.)

But also interesting is what's not listed - or barely listed. Product management /product marketing and user experience are significant areas for Google, but the company has a total of just six jobs available in those areas combined.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted the news that Apple has filed comments with the US Copyright Office stating that the act of jailbreaking your iPhone is a copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, and therefore illegal. The EFF says that Apple is claiming that jailbreak apps still require modified versions of Apple's software, and Apple apparently believes that those versions are infringing on their copyrights.

The EFF responds, in turn, that "reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software," saying that yes, even though jailbreakers are using Apple's copyrighted code, they are doing so in a way that allows them functionality that Apple doesn't provide access to on their own.

At this point, of course, this is just a complaint in the copyright office, and Apple hasn't made any legal moves yet against anyone responsible for jailbreaking. As the EFF states, it would be extremely hard for them to go after individual jailbreakers -- if you buy an iPhone, it should be your right to "get under the hood," as they say, and do what you want.

But (and keep in mind that this is TUAW, not The Unofficial Legal Weblog, and we are not lawyers) it seems Apple may be able to try and make a case against anyone offering software that does modify or otherwise "misuse" their copyrighted code. We'll have to see if they explore that position more in the future. You can read Apple's full response here (27 pages). You can see the EFF's initial filings here.

Stay tuned for more news and analysis on the issue.

Apple says jailbreaking is illegal originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple says jailbreaking is illegal originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By Simon Pulman-Jones, GfK NOP


Ethnography may differ from what is traditionally regarded as 'normal' ressearch, but it is far from the dark art that it is sometimes perceived as. Indeed, it's high time to dispel some of the myths that have sprung up around ethnography so that organisations can understand its true nature.

The first myth to dispel is that ethnography is not a method; it is a research approach that uses a wide selection of methods:

- Secondary and semiotic analyses: understanding the systems behind all the things that you ‘just know’.
- Informal observation: used as a ‘first pass’ research tool, to generate questions, focus issues or confirm choice of venue or target audience.
- Formal observation: expert researchers in the natural, day-to-day setting, observing what people do, how they interact, the kinds of things they use, etc.
- Interviews: in-context, narrative interviews, which try to elicit the participant’s view of the world.
- Self-documentation: where the participant is given the tools and structure, and then records their own critical and open-ended self-reporting, logging the things that they see as most important to the question, rather than being led in any way.
- Groups & events

It does not aim to study people, but instead uses the techniques above to observe people in order to examine every day experiences, situations, environments, activities, relations, interactions and processes in very rich detail.

Despite often being perceived as a bit of a black art, ethnography is rooted in the disciplined treatment of data. By far the most important part of ‘doing ethnography’ is the rigorous analysis of all the data gathered and interpretation of key data patterns. The participants are experts on their own experiences and the ethnographers are experts at translating those experiences into a descriptive and analytic account that clarifies business issues and reveals the cultural basis for consumer experiences. The goal is to produce a consistent body of data that can have utility beyond the study’s original scope.

WHY USE ETHNOGRAPHY?
The commercial benefits of using ethnography are that it provides:

- A clear understanding of any given experience from your customers’ point of view and entirely true-to-life.
- A remarkable richness of data.
- Highly actionable information with long shelf life.

The unique value of ethnography is that it reveals not just what people say or how they think, but also provides a clear understanding of how experiences work, so that businesses can see what actions they need to take to support, improve and change those experiences.

Filed under: Video, Apple

If you are a high school or college student, then you can now register a team for Apple's 2008 Insomnia Film Festival. The idea behind the festival is simple. Apple will post a list of elements you can use in your film, you pick three of them, and then take 24 hours to make a 3 minute movie.

If you are the lucky grand prize winner, your team will receive: 5 MacBook Pro notebook computers, 5 Final Cut Studio 2 box sets, 5 copies of Shake, 5 Logic Studio box sets, and 5 One to One personal training cards. That sure is a nice set up!

If you want to get in on the action, check out Apple's Insomnia Film Festival website, and register your team today! All the fun will start on November 15th at 9:00 a.m. EST. And if you like the Insomnia logo, Apple has posted wallpaper for both Mac and iPhone/iPod touch on the site.