Category: Featured

Experience design session

Design process at inKind

     

Refining the design process at inKind.  Or: Why did you choose the path of a designer if you’re not enjoying what you do. As I took the leap from full-time to “consulting”, there were a lot of aspirations I had for what Kaloupek Design could become. One of them was to work with good people on impactful projects with a great team. By design or accident, I’ve found that with our team at inKind. Amongst many values I scribbled down last year was a reminder to myself: Enjoy the process of Design (again). Often work is rushed, and you’re looking for a […]

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Agile Design for 18F Development Challenge

      

18F is an government contracting agency that acts more like a tech start-up than a traditional government agency.  They introduced a short timeline, design & development challenge around the OpenFDA API to vet future development partners. We used the challenge to demonstrate our ability to design and develop a viable software product with a small, experienced team in an extremely short timeframe. My role as design lead was to assess the OpenFDA and design the most impactful product we could create with a small, agile team in a short timeframe. Quick decisions When the development challenge was released, 18F gave no specification of “what” type of product they’d like […]

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User Experience: the barrier-to-entry for better healthcare software

        

As a design team, we have unknowingly become an expert in designing the user experience for healthcare software. Intended or not, many of our  projects focus on some aspect of the healthcare space. Checklist apps for service providers. Back-office software to eliminate wait times and help veterans. Commercial software for a major healthcare providers patient records and business. Myself and many of our development team came from a company that creates healthcare enrollment software. We understand 835 forms and ICD-10 codes. We understand how to move a user through a 14 page form and make them not hate it… too much. Over the dozen related projects, we’ve accumulated domain knowledge in a […]

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What an Agile Design Process looks like

       

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought a lot about what an Agile Design process looks like. We practice it every day at SPARC without any formal definition. As our design team has grown in the past 3 years, we’ve let go of some traditional design practices in favor of ones that more closely match the work we’re doing. Our projects range from UX for software to marketing websites. Each project is slightly different, based on the team and the overall goal. When we call it a process, we’re really just looking at the common practices that make any type of project successful […]

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