Tag: technology

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Foresight Product Design User Experience

Little steps, big leap

The process of product development comprises a variety of steps that each have their importance to understand and produce for the user. Every product is different with its purpose and output so the evolution stage will present with different challenges that might influence your approach. Designers shouldn’t be afraid when starting something new, it’s normal to doubt how some aspects of the process will turn into cheap shots making the work harder. This is normal and there isn’t a solution to this common issue, but rather a set of experiences that can build your confidence into reducing stress and help you along the way. Should you find a moment of weakness or doubt, pause and reflect to address your location on the map, this will help you strengthen aspects that are often discarded within the design community.

Consider the following when the need to create something new arises:

  • The research phase will be long and require more resources than you think: new products require you to explore new areas that you never had the chance to visit. You are going to spend more time looking for your topics than analyzing them to extract what you’re looking for. This requires you to balance resources so you don’t  spend too much time in your earlier stages.
  • Data redundancy will be constant: while collecting elements you will find similar data among your team that creates the tendency to expand conversation and time dedicated discussing the information. Everyone during the discovery phase feels compelled to provide their experience and findings increasing the data quantity and its repetition; pay attention to what information is essential to the existence of your product and leave the rest for later.
  • Create an early proposal: once you gathered enough data in the discovery phase you should create an early proposal to the stakeholder to understand if you are on the right track. This saves you time and budget because nobody is happy to find out they got it wrong after five months of work.
  • The product you’re developing is just the first step: this important aspect is often overlooked. You are not developing just a product, you’re establishing a practice method to build a longer path for you and your client to develop business opportunities. This encourages you to be open, to foster broader ideas, to plan ahead, and to increase client loyalty benefiting both parties. Foresight is a vital part of product development because within more complex environments, you will have to interface with System Designers, Compliance, Legal department, to make sure everything is safe and sound.
  • Team brainstorming is vital: it doesn’t matter if you are working in a small or large team, or if you are the only designer working on the project. The important thing is to brainstorm with other colleagues such as developers, product owners, tech department, to understand their point of view and how their input can enrich and assist your development process.
  • Increased focus on lo-fi testing is better: designers have the tendency to show the pretty interfaces so they can convey a richer sense to stakeholders by having hi-fi models. Take a step back and make the lo-fi or skeleton system work first like clockwork, it’s easier this way because your focus is on the basic working mechanics: before you can run you need to walk.
  • Stakeholders are your friends: as I mentioned a few lines earlier, sharing information with stakeholders allows to keep them in the loop and welcomed in the process. Empathy is your best friend and you will look like a considerate designer that can take care of people, products, development tasks, acquiring more awareness and important feedback.

Product development required the creation of an experience satisfying the user’s needs and client’s expectations. Remember to stay focused on who is the user and what are the essential key points to make your product viable first and scalable later.

Happy prototyping!

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Foresight

The tech race for the next economy

The last four weeks gave us a sad panoramic of the bad preparation state western countries are living in. Despite the wide availability of technology we suddenly discovered this invisible wall affecting the healthcare sector, and no country in Europe or North America had the contingency to get ready for this pandemic.

We are not talking about the lack of expensive medical equipment, but the simple things like those face masks doctors are in dire need just to go by their simple tasks. Then we also seen the need for respirators so companies are scrambling to convert their production lines to meet the new demand. Virgin Orbit did so and surprisingly we can see a simple and cheap mechanism that can help patients, yet too many hospitals are in short of.

While Apple already ventured into healthcare with user information being harvested via their devices, we will now see companies invest into the medical field with a great emphasis seeking new growth and new profits. This will be driven by a new demand for hospitals, universities, and labs, to acquire new personnel and students with an interest in immunology and infectious diseases. The great demand for vaccines, machineries, and AI, will propel the global economy to the Industry 4.0 moving away from older production practices and affecting the labor force

The tech race for the next economy will venture into more data-gathering and its elaboration to provide more accurate information. With the implementation of AI in the healthcare sector to improve cognition and analysis of medical data, we can expect significant investments in the digital realm influencing global markets to head towards that direction. This has the possibility to affect doctors’ behavior in delegating more responsibilities of diagnosis towards AI, thus changing this role into a more managerial function applied to direct nursing staff and other hospital personnel. However I wouldn’t exclude banks from entering the healthcare industry business with a heavy foot.

Another important field that will reshape production sectors are the 3D printing technologies applied for small and large scale projects. In March an Italian engineer managed to help patients in intensive care in northern Italy by printing in a few hours the much needed oxygen valves for the hospital. In case small hospitals should be built during emergencies we can rely on 3D concrete printing for fast solutions; using more printers in one site it’s possible to raise a safe and durable structure with better qualities than the traditional brick method.

These technologies are already here and have already delivered so much in recent years. Companies can access this tech realm without having to resort to big capitals to invest, this mean small enterprises can innovate their sector and themselves. This pandemic and consequential economic crisis will trigger this race for survival, pushing more into the digital world than ever before.

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A new life awaits you

The year is 2020 just started in the worst possible manner. After leaving behind a grouchy 2019 wishing the next one to be better, we stumble into undiscovered space with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are learning things as we go in these months and it shouldn’t be like that. Despite our best effort in technology-making there are several fallacies we haven’t addressed yet; one of the many is the our own behavior we are exploring under particular stress.

In 2003 the SARS epidemic begun raising alarms of the ease at which such disease managed to spread. I remember those white, green, and blue masks, on the face of people in Toronto believing it would have been a much worse scenario, luckly it didn’t happen. Fast forward 2020 and the Corona Virus (similar to SARS) has placed the world on its knees becoming a direct threat to many healthcare systems and economies.

We are witnessing the weak and unprepared side of globalization where markets have no more boundaries, and so do people. Now, more than ever, western economies are depending more and more from the east and in particular from China. Our technology is made far away from the stores near our neighbors, yet all it took to send panic and supply shortages was a controllable disease that was left unchecked.

As quarantines have struck all major countries of the globe, we are slowly understanding how tomorrow will be different from yesterday. We acknowledge how frail our economies are, how easy it is to get sick, how fast we can lose our loved ones to an invisible enemy. What is propelling through this chaos is the digital component of our lives, we can still exchange data between each other, we can work from home, we can do school from our devices, but the next change in society is already here.

Hopefully the quarantine and extraordinary measures should fade through the spring, however there is still plenty of caution we have to excercise before we can resume yesterday’s pace. From today on we will be thinking twice about many things like how easy the panic was for the lack of hand-sanitizers, or the toilet paper rush. But most importantly we will rethink our political class and how they responded in time of crisis.

We are going to become more paranoid and more fake news will wash ashore of our social networks, and this will become our ever increasing Achilles’ heel; more than anything else: we have become such an iperconnected society to the point we cannot go back anymore. A new life awaits you…

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Jam Hacking Google Maps

Simon Weckert started carrying with him 99 smartphones on a handcart to fool Google a cluster of users were all in the same spot. The result is a virtual traffic jam that tricked Google Maps road conditions in the red, but it was just him alone walking the street of Berlin.