How interaction design can help people better communicate with each other
Anna Abovyan is a User Experience Design Manager leading all things design at M*Modal, a speech recognition and natural language processing company in the healthcare space, recently acquired by 3M. Originally from Armenia, she’s based in Pittsburgh and is co-chair of the local IxDA chapter. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Tell us what you do and how you became an interaction designer?
Nowadays I call myself an interaction designer, but I’m an engineer and a geek at heart. I graduated with a degree in mathematics from my home country of Armenia and found my way to design through a series of personal and professional twists and turns. I moved to the United States with my family after graduation and became a software engineer at a large corporation.
As time went on, I became increasingly more frustrated as I watched us build software that was borderline unusable, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it. We made decisions in a vacuum, never questioning what our users were like.
And then I accidentally stumbled across Don Norman’s “Design of Everyday Things” on a beach vacation (true story!), and light bulbs went off in my brain. I realized that there’s an entire field of study that encompasses all my passions: engineering, design, psychology, and, most importantly, logic and information architecture.
Which of your projects best represents how interaction design improves the human condition?
I’m extremely proud of our work at M*Modal. We are focusing on addressing the fundamental issue in the healthcare system: lack of time dedicated to meaningful conversations between doctors and patients. We call it “creating time to care.”
Physicians in the US spend over half of their time on clerical work, doing what amounts to an extremely inefficient and often redundant data entry and data retrieval, and only about a third of their time on clinical interactions. No wonder that physician burnout rates are sky-high, resulting in poor healthcare outcomes for all of us. This is a problem created by bureaucracy and poorly designed technology, and we must fix it.
At M*Modal we believe that a proper way to address this is to create technology that embraces the most human interaction modality of them all: conversation. The award-winning products that my team worked on over the years allow physicians to express and explore the patient story in their own words, just as they would with a competent human colleague.
What far-reaching impact can interaction design make on society?
I believe the biggest potential that interaction design discipline possesses is the ability to help people communicate better with each other. Whether it is doctors and patients, parents and teachers, governments and citizens, or anyone else, we could all benefit from technology that enables, empowers, and frees us to really hear each other and engage in constructive conversations.
Where do you go for inspiration?
I travel solo a lot, and I find inspiration in paying attention to the subtleties of cultures, places, cuisines, and attitudes around the world. It could be as simple as noticing a clever crosswalk sign or people-watching in a city where I don’t speak the language.
What are your passions and interests?
I love math, science, and understanding how things work: from tuning a clock mechanism to gene editing. I also enjoy learning new languages (it’s Romanian now!), building miniature houses, cuddling with a book on my favorite couch, and oh so many other ways to procrastinate. :)
What’s your design philosophy and how does it manifest in your work?
I believe that first and foremost, we designers have to stay curious and pay attention — and not just to the individual pixels or workflow intricacies. We need to pay attention to broader ecosystems, both the ones that our users occupy and at our own workplaces. This includes actively seeking out information about business realities, financial reports, market trends, workplace politics, interpersonal relationships, and so much more.
I believe that the most influential design teams are not the ones locked away in glossy design centers, but the ones that are embedded with engineers, researchers, support, HR, and other vital parts of the organization, connecting the silos with an invisible glue, and I’d like to think that my team is one of those.
What advice would you give to designers coming into the field; to your younger self?
I wish someone told me early on that there is no such thing as “the right design process”. Every project is unique and requires its own set of tools and processes that needs to continually evolve. Don’t think that you are “doing it wrong” because you never ran THAT Workshop that THAT Author talked about at THAT Conference. If your work continues to improve the human condition and you have fun doing it, you’re on the right track.
What’s it like trying to keep up with the pace of the technology that’s constantly evolving, but also to help push that same tech, and those experiences, forward?
We are so lucky to be living and working in these exciting times. Despite everything we hear on the news, technology is more helpful than ever, lifting an enormous number of people out of poverty, empowering them with knowledge, creating new opportunities for prosperity and self-expression.
As designers, we get to guide these technologies into useful channels, and I think we should be humbled and thankful for the opportunity.
