My name is Natasha, I’m a user researcher and experience designer currently working in healthcare

Research Process

When conducting research, I follow and adjust general best practices to the needs of my projects. Beginning with understanding the scope of the work that I am being asked to complete, and working from there. Regardless of the goals or type of research, my next steps stay consistent.

I start with my preparation: determining my method, my research questions, my participants, and drafting my interview/observation/testing guides.

Then I move on to conducting my research, actually running my studies be they interviews, observations, or usability test.

With my data in hand I move on to my analysis. While I always have some kind of question in mind, I like to approach my data with a perspective rooted in grounded theory, allowing patterns and insights to emerge from the data. Combined with research questions this approach ensures that I both answer my questions and leaves space for any new discoveries I make along the way.

Finally I turn my research into something digestible to my colleagues. Again, this is a variable step, requiring different levels of information in different formats depending on the teams. I’ve built research summary presentations, written reports, designed experience maps, and translated my findings into requirements, interfaces, interactions, JIRA stories, and short snippets to share in daily or weekly meetings with teammates. The common goal to all of these reporting methods is to present my research to the people who need it, when they need it, in a way that they understand and value.

My Principles

Understand the problem, but don’t let it blind you to insight

While it’s important to understand the scope and goals of research, staying too focused on them can blind us to weird and wonderful workflows and adaptations that users make with out software.

Triangulate research methods for the best coverage

While surprising to no one, the more ways you approach a problem, the more opportunities you have to learn from users. I think this is especially true of generative research, though it also applies to evaluative research

User Experience Team of One: Clario Case Study

Clario is a workflow management tool for radiologist practices that automates the presentation of studies to radiologists for their review and streamlines communications between radiologists, administrators, and support staff.

My focus on building a foundation of knowledge around Clario allows me to design experiences for improvements to existing and new features quickly and efficiently. It has also helped me to anticipate the needs to users in their enhancement requests.

• Conduct Foundational Research

  • Stakeholder and User Interviews, Observations

• Evaluate New Projects and Designs

  • Usability Tests, Heuristic Evaluations, Cognitive and Conceptual walkthroughs

• Gather, Define, Document User Requirements

• Design interfaces and interactions for new projects
   

Making the data Dance: Clairvoyance

Like any industry, Radiology is constantly looking for more data to inform business decisions. Clairvoyance was designed as part of our product line to expose productivity data to radiologists to inform their work.

My research allowed us to present more information with greater context to the radiologists within the same single page dashboard.

• Evaluate colleague’s designs

  • Usability Tests, Cognitive Walkthroughs

• Work with Designer to improve data visualizations

• Explore radiologist needs for admin level data

  • Stakeholder and User Interviews
     

Exposing Research Blind Spots: CloudRIS

One avenue explored by Intelerad to increase market share was to develop an in house front of clinic system (like a reservation system for a hotel) to replace the ancient one currently available.

Unfortunately, they hired a researcher quite late in the development cycle so my research exposed some fatal workflow holes that they were unaware of, leading to the cancellation of the project.

• Evaluate the developed “MVP” and designs

  • Usability tests, cognitive walkthroughs

• Conduct Foundational Research

  • Stakeholder and User Interviews, Conceptual interviews, Observations, Literature/Research Review
     

Researching with Kids: Zeno

I worked with a teammate and some post-doctoral researchers to research social robots as a tool for facilitating learning social interactions for autistic children through robot mediated games.

We developed and tested our social game with the Zeno robot. Unfortunately our semester was not long enough to continue our research.

• Ethical Review

• Child Friendly Usability Tests