The advertisement here was pretty funny because when we sat down with the client, they told us that students were coming back to school and they wanted to convey a feeling that the students really needed furniture. In a flash of utter brilliance </sarcasm>, I exclaimed, “Why not just say ‘You need furniture’?” They went with it and had a great sale that weekend.

Bisk Totaltape were the folks who wrote all of the CPA Exam books.

William R. Hough was one of the University of Florida’s biggest benefactors. The company was based in St. Petersburg but was sold in the early 2000s.
 

I created the following diagram in Visio at one job:

 While it’s attempting to convey a lot of information, and it’s well organized (and based on the customer’s original Visio document), I felt it could be simplified for the non-technical people who would be listening and trying to pay attention to the presentation that would accompany the graphic. I used Illustrator to to this.

Both diagrams ended up being used. The Visio diagram was used by the technology-oriented folks who understood all of the nuances and intricacies of the diagramming, while the visually “flashy” diagram was something people with less of a technology background and simple grasp of the concepts could better understand.

I was tasked with simply making the experience appear to be as smooth and easy as possible. I create animated “progress” indicators and made sure people knew when they were on a Google site and when they were on a Blue Cross Blue Shield site (or a combination of the two).

I also created a wire diagram to help stakeholders and programmers alike understand what is actually happening from a big-picture point-of-view. For instance, people needed to be reminded of things like HIPAA (relating to the privacy of medical records).

I’ve worked on various aspects of the projects at all levels, even including content writing, video camera operation and all of the graphics, logos, business cards, brand identity, etc. Right now, I’m exploring moving the site I quickly designed a while ago into HTML5 and converting it into a completely table-less website. I’ve been playing around with a bunch of CSS tricks as well in order to create layering effects and such. CSS3 and HTML5 are definitely a godsend for employing drop shadows and such. Last but not least, I’m using the Google Fonts API to make the site’s text have that “old printing press” look. Take a look… none of the text is graphics (well, except the header)… it’s all HTML and CSS. Pretty neat, eh?

Recently I worked for EDS (now an HP Company) whose client was a major healthcare provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. I was tasked as the vendor’s UI designer and usability specialist on location. My role was to affect as much as possible the client’s needs through our IT services and technologies. I worked directly with our programmers but also helped finesse requirements and take accessibility and usability issues into account.

On the projects I was tasked, I was a little surprised by the lack of accessibility in general. BCBSMA was a healthcare provider, and a good number of their customers probably had disabilities of some kind, including vision impairment. This is not to say BCBSMA wasn’t on the ball. In fact, their design teams were very interested in bringing their client-facing sites into Section 508 compliance. They just had many priorities, so I decided to get our team at EDS aware of these needs by proposing the idea that web accessibility shouldn’t be viewed as an expansion of a budget, but rather saving costs that would be deferred normally to other departments, namely Customer Service.

It only makes sense that a healthcare provider or insurance company would accommodate a wider range of users because their business involves dealing with customers who often have disabilities or impairments that limit their abilities to access or use their online resources. But ideas such as accessibility, usability and compatibility are often de-scoped because of limited budgets, as mentioned before. These providers are looking for the most price-efficient solution that they think takes care of “most people”. We’re talking about the Law of Diminishing Returns here… do the most you can for the least amount of money, because it’ll cost more, per capita, to make it work for the outliers (ie, the disabled).

The problem is that those users don’t just give up when they can’t access an online resource due to their disability or impairment. They try to contact someone, such as a Plan Sponsor, or the Provider’s phone support. Not only that, but the Plan Sponsor (who is also the customer when you think about it in terms of healthcare) is upset because their disabled employees are contacting them instead of using a website that they thought would support their own customers / employees. This might mean that the Plan Sponsor is willing to go with another provider in the coming enrollment season.

So while de-scoping a project of accessibility, compatibility and other issues may have saved X amount of dollars from the estimate, some other means of support must now be employed for those users who cannot access the site. This could actually be much higher in terms of cost, and have an inverse effect on ROI (Return on Investment).

In summary, ignoring users because of budget often simply defrays costs to other cost centers, and even the customers themselves. This can be “bad PR” and influences customer relations. Making sites accessible has the potential to drastically reduce these pain points. It also creates better web experiences for users, better PR, and it reinforces and cultivates future customer commitments.

The original design called for something akin to the older generation of websites with splash pages, ie. using a strong image “grabber” and then send people off to the subpages.

Eventually this yielded to a different idea which involved a more classic image of a surfer on a wave. Iconography based on the pendants and accessories sold were used for various site categories.

The main State Street employee intranet was about to go through some major updates, and so I came up with some design ideas that included resizing text for people with different monitor resolutions or vision impairments. This was around the beginning of the move towards not just web usability, an idea well known since the days of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but actual accessibility to technology (like websites) for people with disabilities and impairments. Sometimes this is known in industry jargon as “508 compliance” as an allusion to Section 508, an amendment made to the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It’s all meant to give better access to technologies for the disabled.

The group seemed to like the new direction, however it all came around the time HR was tasked with cutting $50 million in salaries. They ended up axing half of the entire marketing division, including Interactive Marketing. I was a contractor and apparently they had lost track of me (and other contractors). We sat working in an empty office space for about three or four hours until someone from HR came down and asked us who we were and then told us our contracts were terminated. This sort of thing happens with large companies, I suppose.