Designed to be used in the field, the program allows individuals to quickly describe their concerns about a friend or family member. Using an algorithm based on a meta analysis of existing literature of behavioral indicators of PTSD, the program returns an assessment summary suggesting actions steps to the user.

As the software development subcontractors for the project, our task was to develop an easy-to-use interface and workflow, then implement the expert system strategies necessary to provide accurate recommendations.

The project required us to build a desktop application that might also need to be used on the web, so we developed our tool in Adobe Air. After a few different iterations and focus group testing, we settled on a simple linear navigation structure – the right arrow moves you forward and the left arrow moves back.

It’s amazing how the best ideas usually turn out to be so simple.

Before getting to any specific questions, users are able to type their concerns into a text box (if they’re connected to the internet). This allows the user to express themselves right from the start, getting to the most important issues immediately.

It’s kind of like your doctor asking, “So, how are you feeling today?”.

Based on an extensive knowledgebase grounded in the literature, the unstructured text submitted by the user is analyzed for relevant content. Then, the program automatically answers any applicable multiple choice questions.

Of course, we show the user what questions were answered by their free-text entry and give them the opportunity to change their response.

Users continue through 4 sets of simple yes/no questions, things like: “Does your friend or relative seem to be distant or removed from others?” If they answer Yes, they must indicate the severity on a scale of 1 to 5. Users can answer as many or as few questions as they want.

Only 17 questions later (the entire process typically takes under 5 minutes), PAS provides a recommendation and explains which factors contributed to the assessment. While the feedback is not an official diagnosis, it give military personnel practical advice about how to respond, or what actions are appropriate.

Users can email the report to their supervisor, or save it to their computer for future reference. To ensure privacy issues don’t prevent someone from using the tool, none of the answers are stored.

The tool is simple to use and gives military personnel a quick, anonymous method of expressing their concerns and receiving advice.

Idea Works developers, Matt and Kara, did a fantastic job building a solid, user-friendly program and our friends at Lincoln are currently shopping it around to different groups. We hope to see widespread adoption soon.

For information about using the Peer Advising System, please contact the Center for Suicide Prevention Research and Studies at 573.681.5225 or CSPRS{at}lincoln{dot}edu.

I’m not a natural runner, but I’ve gotten in the habit of jogging 2-3 miles around the track three times a week. It keeps me healthy and — once I got over the initial pain — it has become addictive.

Still, I’m no Ironman (no, not the superhero).

After a mile or two, my body wants to call it quits. I start shuffling my legs instead of taking long, efficient strides. My head sags. My feet begin flailing outward. My breathing becomes irregular and my back hunches up.

No, I’m not having a stroke — I’m just tired.

When my body is exhausted, I’ve found that I need to pay special attention to my form. Too easily, my tired body becomes a clumsy body. Clumsy movements are inefficient, and only tire me out more quickly.

So, down the stretch, I begin focusing on my running posture and breathing.

I keep my head upright and make sure to relax my shoulders and arms. I ensure my legs are compact, making efficient strides. I begin to slow my breathing, inhaling and exhaling in a deep, intentional rhythm.

Concentrating on my form doesn’t guarantee I’ll be in the Boston Marathon next year, but it gives me the best chance to complete my goal for the day and finish the run feeling strong.

I’ve found that a similar strategy works well when solving a design problem.

Say you’re designing a new web site. If you’re a competent designer, the fundamentals come naturally, and you begin the project as you should: articulating the goals of the project, letting form follow function, adhering to basic design principles like unity, balance, contrast and dominance.

But as a project drags on, even the best of us can succumb to exhaustion. You’re tired of staring at the same site over and over. You’re annoyed by your client’s barrage of uniformed suggestions. You just want to be done so you can move on to the next, more exciting project.

When you’re tired, your form slips.

With design, you know you’re getting tired when you resort to trial-and-error, or when you start creating elements without a goal in mind, or when you build something that any 8th grade art student could improve.

It’s time to double your focus on form. Stop, regroup, consider the fundamentals and let your natural talent take over.

Like a runner, designers should be in a state of constant self-assessment: How am I feeling? Am I doing my best work? What needs to change to give myself the greatest chance to succeed? How is my pace? My form?

Your attitude at the beginning of a project is often different than during those final laps. Pay attention to these changes and adjust as necessary.

When the project is finished, you’ll know you ran a good race.

I’ve never seen someone so excited by data. I was excited too, since Rosling does more than just slap some graphs on a slide. He tells a story with the data.

Rosling explains:

Statistics has to go together with other information and with experience. That’s when it’s useful…People are not stupid. They will understand statistics and they will use it, if it’s made available in relevant and interesting ways.

As professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, Rosling explores data drawn mostly from the United Nations, intent on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world. His arguments and observations are convincing, though his main appeal lies in the way he presents data.

Convinced that global data should be accessible and understandable, Rosling founded Gapminder with his son and daughter-in-law in 2005. Gapminder was purchased by Google in 2007.

Gapminder assembles and standardizes an impressive collection of international data, then presents them as animated, interactive graphs. By emphasizing statistical time series, Gapminder gives life to numbers on economy, energy, health, employment and more.

Who would have thought I could waste a whole morning generating charts on infant mortality, oil consumption, and family size? The interface is incredibly slick, the data are thought-provoking, and the animations are illuminating.

In short — you have to try it.

In our data-obsessed culture, we need more pioneers like Rosling to help us find comprehensive and engaging methods to present information. We’ve got numbers on everything, but information is easily misconstrued unless placed in the proper context, in relation to other relevant information.

Perhaps more importantly — let’s be honest here — numbers are boring to most people. A typical Excel table or graph isn’t capable of empowering and mobilizing people for broad social change.

Rosling shows us how global data — presented in the right way — naturally lead to an engaging look at the big picture. Presenting information should tell a story.

Rosling’s story is about how the world is getting more and more similar. He predicts countries like China and India will replace western nations (like the United States and the United Kingdom) as the leading world economy by 2048.

What’s your story?

But that’s only half the story.

It’s vital to remember that a user’s experience on your site is more than the sum of their clicks. Ideally, we’d all have the chance to sit in the same room as our users, watching their every move then interviewing them about their experience. But besides being somewhat creepy, such one-on-one assessment is rarely practical.

Fortunately, there are a host of web-based tools available designed to collect qualitative data from your users quickly at a reasonable price.

Here are some of my favorites:

Userfly

Price: $0/mo – $200/mo

After getting an account and adding one line of code to your site, Userfly records videos of user visits, letting you see mouse movements, click and form interaction. It’s a straight-forward way to see actual users interacting with your site.

There’s a great demo available to test it out, and the free account gives you 10 captures each month.

ClickTale

Price: $0/mo – $790/mo

ClickTale also records user visits and provides some great aggregate reports to help further understand user behavior. For instance, their form analytics report details where visitors might be giving up on your form. And the heatmaps metric shows which content visitors are actually viewing. What parts of the page do visitors skip? How far down do they scroll?

You also get enhanced information about link clicking behavior. Besides collecting click rates, ClickTale tells you how long users hovered over links and hover-to-click ratios.

FiveSecondTest

Price: Free

FiveSecondTest allows you you to submit your designs for testing. Other users view your design for five seconds, then jot down five things they remember.

While it’s not as comprehensive as some other services, FiveSecondTest provides a really quick overview of how others react to your web page. If you’re designing a landing page, it’s a great way to ensure users are seeing what you want them to see. The basic functionality is free, so it’s worth throwing your design up there and seeing what people think.

It’s just as easy to do a test yourself, so don’t forget to help another designer out and comment on their page.

Loop11

Price: $350 flat fee for each project (up to 1000 participants)

Loop11 combines user video recording with customized usability surveys. Users interact with your site, completing a series of predefined tasks while answering questions about their experience as they go. All interactions are captured, processed and made available in real-time reports.

The process is simple: create user tests for your website (tasks and questions), invite participants (through an invite link), and analyze your results. Loop11 is a good option for a fairly well-developed project, when you have some specific questions in mind.

UserTesting.com

Price: $29 flat fee for each video

UserTesting.com allows you to watch real people using your website, while they narrate their experience. After creating a user test, UserTesting.com finds testers that meet your criteria. Testers then use your website, recording their screen and speaking their thoughts as they browse. Then you get the video, along with a written summary.

Unlike Loop11, you don’t have to find your own testers, but you pay for each user video ($29 flat fee). If you think you’ll have trouble finding testers, or only need a handful of users (under 10), then UserTesting.com might be a good choice for you.

Last week, I got a chance to journey beyond my computer screen and help lead a focus group testing a project in development, the Peer Advising System (PAS). After some brief instructions, our potential users were let loose to explore the application. And I got to watch.

While we only tested about 20 users, I collected a truckload of useful feedback. Observing someone interact with our program for the first time allowed me to specifically see how they approached the program, how we could have provided more instruction, and the overall mood of the user experience.

Most of all, I enjoyed talking with the group of testers afterward. PAS is designed to help military personnel identify a friend that may be exhibiting symptoms linked to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and many of our users related stories of friends, cousins and fathers who needed help, but never got it.

It was touching to remember the purpose behind our project and to get affirmation that our application would help soldiers and marines stay healthy and safe.

We collected important quantitative data during the week too, but as Jocelyn Wyatts in an article for GOOD reminds us:

When evaluating the effectiveness of a program, quantitative data alone does not convey enough meaning, and typically leaves us with many questions. Numbers are, of course, necessary, but shouldn’t be relied on alone. Statistics should be complemented by deep stories of the impacts on an individual, family, or a community, and we should spend as much time thinking about how to effectively craft these stories as we do focusing on how to present the numbers.

There is something comforting about number-centric, black-and-white metrics. But that’s not the whole picture.

Effectively evaluating your theory, application or product relies on connecting people’s unique perspectives and individual experiences with the data about them.

The Open Architecture Challenge is an open, international design competition hosted once every two years on the Open Architecture Network. It reaches beyond the traditional bounds of architecture by challenging architects and designers to partner with the broader public to address architectural inequities affecting the health, prosperity and well-being of under-served communities.

This years challenge was designing a classroom that met the unique needs of the future. While the submission deadline has already passed, we are still quite excited about seeing the results that come from increased collaboration. The most exciting part of challenges like these are that students and teachers across the globe can let the world know what they need to meet the unique needs of the 21st century classroom. By working together we can certainly create a better future for us all.

Most people who work with or around websites or web applications are aware of the mantra “Tables shouldn’t be used in design,” but I don’t think all of them understand why. To explain, I’d point you to a practical example: http://www.csszengarden.com/

The css Zen Garden is a great way to look at the power of separating content from design. Every page in the collection uses the same simple HTML page but achieves very different organization and style using simple CSS.

This wouldn’t be possible if you didn’t separate your design from your content. Using tables for layout exactly breaks this rule. A giant table that wraps your content to achieve three columns commits your page to a life of three columns with no hope of changing. (It should go without saying that tables have their place and their use…for building tables.)

Definitions: Markup, Style and Layout

It’s important to have clear definitions about the three components of web design. Some others may vary slightly, but I like to think of them this way.

Markup groups and annotates your content. For example, if a phrase is a heading, it gets marked appropriately. If two or three paragraphs are all related, they get grouped. If you have notes sprinkled throughout, each of the notes gets annotated in a similar way.

Style breaths life into your content by adding color, typography, background gradients, etc.

Layout is what defines the organization of your page. For example, three columns or two? Where should the header go in relation to the content? What about the footer?

In Practice: HTML, CSS and …

For markup, HTML is your tool at hand. If you use markup wisely, your HTML can read really well (i.e. make sense to a human) and offer insight into what content is important or related.

CSS is the style tool. If you want your headings to be big, read, and bold, then this is where you do it.

Layout is where things get cloudy. We don’t have a layout language that is standard. This is where and why people disagree with the table mantra described earlier. Without a real layout language, designers are left to hack together their own solution with a combination of HTML and CSS.

The Answer: Layout

Some designers choose to go with tables for layout, but as pointed out earlier, this is a bad idea because it makes your page very inflexible. I prefer to go with floating DIVs, although I’ll gladly admit that side effects of this method include headaches, shortness of breath and nausea.

One solution that designers are turning to is CSS frameworks, which typically take the form of CSS grids. A few of the more popular ones are the 960 Grid System, Blueprint and the YUI Grids.

These grid systems aren’t the final answer, they’re really just clever designers doing the best they can with the tools they have available. (For example, to make design changes you still need to go searching through your markup to change classes.) But they do make layout easier in the absence of a real layout language.

My one complaint against machine-made goods is precisely this: that they too often hide their light under a bushel of “design”. Think how decent alarm clocks might be if they were just as plain and well-made outside as they often are inside!

If we insist on the ornamental we are not making the best of our system of manufacture, we are not getting the things that system makes best.

The truth is that a thing fit for its purpose is necessarily pleasant to use and also beautiful (i.e. seen as being in itself delightful to the understanding). I think an artist is not a person who makes things beautiful, but simply one who deliberately makes things as well as he can — whether he is a clock-maker or picture-painter; because machine-made things are very much better when no “designer” has had anything to do with them — when they are just plain serviceable things. I think that if you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself.

- British typeface designer Eric Gill in his recent interview with MyFonts

According to Andrew S. Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc.,“the new campaign makes a statement that the U.S. traditional higher education system doesn’t always meet the needs of today’s adult learners, mainly working adults struggling to balance jobs, families and education.”

What do you think? Will adult learners respond to a campaign like this?

Even after 14 hours driving along the icy interstates over the holidays, I never quite figured out the car radio in minivan we borrowed from my in-laws.

As far as I could tell, the main features were an annoying display of animated graphics, bright neon lights that made it impossible to read the labels of the buttons and no off button.

It took me about two hours to figure out how to switch stations, then I decided to play a CD (yes, I still own CDs) and all hell broke loose. By the end of my trip, I still didn’t know what 80% of the controls did.

Is this the best we can do? Is anyone designing car radios that don’t look like navigation controls for a spaceship?