Catalyst Resources Blog

Many of our recent engagements have been around designing instrument control for mission critical applications. These interfaces enable workers to interact with equipment via an interface rather than mechanical gauges, switches and levers.

For example, for a biotech firm we designed and validated the user interface that controls diagnostic systems for analyzing tissue sample pathologies and drug discovery. For an energy optimization and management company we designed the user interface for instrumentation that controls and monitors real-time fuel inventories and environmental compliance. For a security system we designed the user interface that controls security cameras and alarm controls.

The user interface for these kind of instrument control is the link between the operator and decisions that affect critical infrastructure or even life and death medical situations.

So what are some of the challenges when designing these kinds of interfaces?

• Displaying data is not the same thing as displaying information
  Just because you think the interface shows it, doesn't mean operators see it, understand it, know how it correlates with their behavior, or feel motivated to take action.
• It isn't always obvious what to measure
  Determining what exactly are the critical pieces of feedback and environmental cues that operators really on can be challenging. You need to translate the operators "intuitive" understanding of the real world process and cues into an abstracted software interface. Since operators adjust systems according to the information they receive, if you're measuring the wrong thing, their decisions may have less impact or even the wrong impact.
• How do you optimally communicate the information
  Which type of displays are more effective for conveying information for particular tasks? Words, flashing lights, animations, charts and graphs, images, auditory cues, etc.? Different information requires different presentation modes and can engender measurable difference in reaction times.
• What are the most effective ways for the user to interact with the information
  Touch interface, gestural input, mouse, keypad, speech recognition? Which is going to be appropriate so the user interacts more with the task and less with the equipment?
• What are the social and collaborative possibilities
  How can the interface be designed so that it is easy to get outside feedback or collaboration. Can comparison data quickly be pulled for "expert" validation?
• How do you make the interface more engaging than the real world
  Instrument Control Interfaces are primarily about increasing productivity. But to achieve a real productivity gain, operators must use the new interface preferentially over existing systems. A poorly designed and validated interface could very easily be viewed as "Yet another damn display". So it is essential to make the display natural, workflow-useful, and engaging. Otherwise operators will find workarounds and the interface will be of much less value.
• How do you make the interface responsive
  If an instrument control interface is perceived as slow to respond, it will not be optimally used. Actions must be cancel-able, screens should load incrementally, the number of actions to complete a task should be streamlined, etc.

The above just scratch the surface of the challenges that are unique to instrument control user interfaces and application design. Biotech, manufacturing, and energy production/management are the areas where we are seeing the greatest growth in the demand for instrument control interfaces. We design these interfaces using modular, reusable UI, so that they can be re-purposed to other equipment or enhanced without code rewrites. As more and more devices gain embedded processors, the market for interface control will continue to expand at a rapid pace.

I often talk about how mission critical applications have unique requirements when it comes to RIA and user experience design. Broadly speaking mission critical applications require a combination high-performance, at-a-glance clarity, security, redundancy, scheduling, reporting and scalability.

I was explaining these characteristics to a client looking for an RIA front-end design for their green energy production system. I found that the easiest way to explain some of the real-time design requirements was to give examples from our own client work. I thought I would share a few of these from that conversation.

Example requirements for mission critical UI and application design

Scheduling - Trading systems
With most application, when you make a change to a preference of function, you save the change and the change is applied then and there. With international trading systems affecting large $$ trades/data, you need to be able to make changes and then precisely define triggers or schedule when these changes are applied.

Reporting and Tracking - Financial transaction processing
With mission critical applications there often needs to be an audit trail for changes to data, system settings and transactions. For example when changes are made to the interest rate on credit card there needs to be a non-alterable record that tracks who did it, when, and why.

Clear Conceptual Models - Flight planning
Complex or mission critical systems needs to designed it so that the user knows exactly what they're interacting with. In flight planning, the FAA uses a very particular type of document which is drilled into to every pilot or controller. The RIA interface for a flight planning application had to be modeled tightly around this existing model so it was immediately interpretable.

At-a-Glance Clarity - Telecommunications processing
Imagine a system with 200,000,000 transactions a day. The visualization and reporting system needs to be designed to represent mass volumes of things happening with automatic callouts and quick ways to drill down.

Privacy and Security - Medical diagnostic collaboration
While security is vital in every enterprise, security in medical records is a hot button item right now. Web-based medical records and collaboration applications need to have clear options to define roles, access levels, recurring re-validation requirements, and multiple layers of protection.

Redundancy and Validation - Emergency notification
For most web applications, it is standard to have simple error checking for things like entering an invalid email address. But advanced validation and redundancy become vital in mission critical applications. For emergency notification systems that trigger emergency first responders and can impact the physical well-being of many individuals, any alert messages need to have built in redundancy (i.e. you can't accidentally send out a notification without confirmation) and geospatial validation (you can't inadvertently send out a notice to residents in San Francisco about a threat occurring in Seattle).

Scalability - Insurance M&A
Scalability is desirable for any enterprise where there is an expectation for growth and change. But this was critical for an insurance carrier that grew rapidly due to acquisitions. The user base was to expand several orders of magnitude in the course of a very short time and the application would need to scale to accommodate the increased demands without requiring rework.

High Performance - Fuel management
Real-time reporting and high performance applies to virtually all mission critical applications. But when I was discussing this with the green energy company, rather than discussing our work in financial systems (i.e. where it is easy to see how even seconds of delay can translate to millions of dollars in impct), I instead referenced real-time remote monitoring, management and incident reporting of critical fuel supplies - such as in power plants, backup power systems, emergency fleets vehicles. As inventory drops or there is a change in the status of a critical fuel system, many actions need to quickly and automatically come into play to avert catastrophic failures.

Designing RIAs that address these mission critical requirements is not simple. In addition to the technical demands, it requires extensive user validation and testing as well as an understanding of the inner workings and organizational structures of large enterprises. Needless to say, it makes for very interesting and challenging work.

As I've written before, I have become very active in the area of energy and environmental optimization - aka sustainability. I've been collaborating with several individuals, VCs and tech firms in Silicon Valley, working to define and lead sustainability efforts.

My interest in sustainability is multi-faceted, reflecting my own diverse range of interests:

• As an Environmentalist: Developing solutions to our energy and resource needs that does not adversely affect the future of the planet and of my children is of paramount importance.
• As a Technophile: The hardware/software developments behind sustainability are some of the most technically interesting and socially relevant developments going on today.
• As a Businessman: As an entrepreneur, I recognize the enormous business opportunity offered by sustainability development and implementation. Eco-efficiency and creating low carbon-products is already a multi-billion dollar industry and will only continue to grow and expand.
• As a SaaS Application Designer: It is clear to me, that software to monitor, manage and monetize energy and resource use, whether at the consumer/individual level or at the corporate level will be provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The design of these applications - everything from signup to functionality to billing to support to visual branding to reporting - all aspects of the entire customer life cycle, will be critical to success.
• As a User Experience Designer: As someone with a keen interest in how to design user experiences that both motivate and facilitate user performance, sustainability presents an exciting challenge. Sustainability solutions that require user interaction including carbon accounting, tracking and capital investments, will be applied only in so far as they are meaningful, intuitive to use, and synergize with existing conceptual models and business processes.

While there are certainly more perspectives I can list, suffice it to say that I have many motivations driving me to take a lead in the field of sustainability.

The Rubric of Sustainability

One of the challenges when discussing sustainability, has been to find a concise way to describe and organize the diversity of services and the potential $$s that fall under the rubric of sustainability.

I've come up with a simple framework for classifying various sustainability efforts and services - a kind of Sustainability System of Record:

1. Production - Technologies devoted to creating carbon-neutral energy or reducing greenhouse gas emissions and waste production.
2. Distribution - Technologies devoted to distributing energy and resources efficiently from production source to consumption source.
3. Optimization - A broad category describing the initiatives an orgainzation or individual takes to optimize the energy and resources consumed and expended.
4. Output - The results of applying the optimization efforts.

Below I have an off-the-top-of-my-head list of what kinds of products and services fall into each category. I will be expanding and refining this list further in the next few blog posts. In addition to classifying more of the market services, I also want to try to add in estimates for investment dollars, companies involved, and even identify where there is a need for software solutions and user experience design.

As you can see, this is really just a quick first pass, but I am hoping through reader comments and feedback to be able to refine this into a useful resource.

I just noticed that the Velocity Online Conference is coming up next week. This conference is focused on best practices in performance and operations for web applications to improve the user experience as well as a company's bottom line.

I've written previously about the importance of perceived performance in the design of a SaaS application. For SaaS, where customers can easily switch to another provider, user satisfaction is critically important. Low perceived performance can lead to low satisfaction and high customer churn. High perceived performance can result in high customer satisfaction and stability.

But what is the empirical evidence and how much of a change in perceived performance is necessary to have a significant impact? Well I just came across some hard data - metrics for page views, amount of interaction/use and online revenue presented at Velocity 2009 from some data-heavy players.

The empirical data on the impact of web application performance

Microsoft reported that with Bing, a 2 second slowdown in response time reduced the number of searches by 1.8% and reduced revenue/user by 4.3%. That a lot of money left on the table.

Google reported that as little as a 400 millisecond delay resulted in 0.59% fewer searches per user. But perhaps more interesting, even after the delay was removed, these users still had 0.21% fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affected long term behavior. While Google did not report revenue directly, fewer searches likely means fewer AdWord clicks.

Shopzilla had the most complete data on the impact of performance on the bottom line. A year-long performance redesign reduced response times by 5 seconds (from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds). This resulted in a 7-12% increase in revenue.

But it's really perceived performance that matters

This empirical "bottom line" data becomes even more interesting when it is reviewed in the context of the study 'The Truth About Download Times. This study found that users do not rate the download speeds of Web pages based on the actual stopwatch-clocked download speeds. Perceived speed is dependent on how well "users successfully complete their tasks on a site."

In other words, it's not just page load time that matters. It is the time it takes for a user to successfully complete a task that has the real impact. In the case of the Velocity 2009 data, users couldn't interact with a page until it loaded. Those few milliseconds of additional time, prevented users from accomplishing their search tasks. That signficantly impacted the bottom line.

Designing RIAs for perceived performance

So how do you design a SaaS to enable the user to perform real work more productively - to feel fast, responsive and streamlined. Our RIA designers focus on a number of application flow and design areas.

• Determine the high value scenarios and then reduce the number of actions required to accomplish them
• Minimize the need for complete page refreshes and reloads - the waiting between screens creates serious friction with the user
• Incrementally add information and functionality to a page, based on an analysis of how users process the information (e.g. load a modular component only when needed or in the background based on predictive analysis)
• Progressively download data locally to avoid round-tripping to the database (HTML 5 is a great development here)
• Validate designs (visual, information, interaction and architectural) to determine where users perceive adequate performance vs. where they get slowed down and wait for the web application to catch up
• Enable queries or actions to be canceled - it gives the user a feeling of control and lets them move on to something else they consider more important than waiting
• Add reliable indicators of progress on activities (i.e. don't let users get frustrated in front of a screen not knowing how long something will take)

RIAs are about more than features, graphics and nice visuals. Optimizing perceived and actual performance has a real and quantifiable impact on the bottom line. The more productive an RIA/SaaS design, the more users interact with software.

Like everyone, I want to believe that cutting-edge Cleantech will provide the solution to most or all of our environmental and energy problems.  Whether it’s wind, solar,  geothermal, algae-produced biofuels, laser-powered nuclear fusion, or something even more exotic, most efforts to move the world to a low-carbon, low-resource economy view the sustainability challenge in technological terms.  Much of the dollars are flowing this way as well.

But I am increasingly skeptical.  Notwithstanding the closing scene of 1985’s “Back to the Future,” in which Doc Brown returns from the future and refuels his time-traveling DeLorean with a banana peel, beer can and other garbage, for us in the present, a universal power source that consumes our waste and garbage and turns it into clean energy to power our electrical grid and transportation needs, simply does not exist.

Moreover, even with technological breakthroughs,  Cleantech will struggle to compete head-on against incumbents in established markets. It will take time to take root and become widespread outside of niche environments. But time is one luxury we are lacking if we are going to mitigate climate change.

Sustainability as a parallel track to Cleantech

So I see the need for a parallel sustainability track focused on using software and hardware to optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology. This may not be as “glamorous” as the Cleantech vision of cheap, inexhaustible, carbon-neutral power, but it is likely far more efficacious in the short term, and completely transferable to any new tech in the long term.

As I’ve written previously, companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production in order to:  lower costs across internal operations and their supply chain; meet regulations; and document their sustainability efforts to an increasingly aware consumer.  This requires investment in and development of web applications (specifically SaaS solutions) in order to track, manage, and determine ROI of energy/resource optimization actions.

Innovating the user experience of sustainability

In contrast to Cleantech, the challenge to successfully implementing SaaS-based sustainability solutions is less about designing new technology and more about designing new ways to motivate behavior.  For sustainability SaaS to succeed we need to innovate with user experience. The basic functionality of monitoring and tracking resource use does not really change, but the meaning of the application and the way the user interacts with the application, must be unique and valuable.

Examples of user experience changing the meaning of the mundane abound.  15 years ago, organic food was associated with co-ops and lower incomes.  Along came Whole Foods which changed the experience of shopping organic. The basic product stayed the same, but the meaning and value of the product changed.

The iPod is, of course, a classic example of user experience changing meaning. The iPod was not just an MP3 storage device, it offered a seamless experience for finding, buying, organizing, sharing and listening to music through an intuitive, rich interface.

Design Sustainability SaaS RIAs to be more than record management

As we design SaaS sustainability applications, we need to design the same shift in meaning.  We need to identify propositions so compelling that the customers/business could not have possibly asked for them (user-centered design be damned). This kind of innovation is “push” not “pull” and is based on compelling vision, Rich Internet Application (RIA) design, and the ability to seek inspiration outside of current application.

Most of the pundits for health care IT concur that a move to electronic records and in particular, a move to a SaaS, will significantly benefit insurance companies, hospitals, and physicians.

Looking at just the most basic factors:

• Insurance companies benefit from the online connectivity of SaaS.
• Hospitals benefit from the economies of scale using standardized data and processes.
• Physicians benefit by not having to operate their own patient management and billing systems.

The business case for moving to secure, SaaS-based solutions is real and compelling. But many health care organizations and service providers hesitate to make the first move, in part because of the magnitude of the transition. Where do you start? How do you undertake the project without creating a bloated, interminably delayed IT nightmare.

The answer is, of course, relatively unique for each company and can be determined as part of an application design evaluation. But one "off-the-shelf" approach is simply to identify processes that move electronic information to paper. In most cases these processes introduce both operational overhead expense and the potential for transcription error.

Eliminating this translation step can offer that first step in the design of a SaaS for healthcare markets. Key to success is to build the application UI using modular, reusable components. Re-usability means that you can take any of your modular elements and plug them into new applications or new screens as you expand your application or services. This lets you add on additional services discretely, in a predictable way, implemented over short time scales.

I had planned to get away without having to write a predictions blog this year, but my topic for this week's blog, turns out to also be a prediction.

I've been meeting with many VC firms, investors, and industry leaders in the Valley and it is readily apparent to me that sustainability is a topic on everyone's mind and and a business opportunity on which many startups and established players will focus over the next 5-10 years.

The motivations are very compelling:

• Energy and commodity costs will continue to increase and companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production to lower costs across internal operations and the connected supply chain. (As one colleague put it: "The days of cutting costs via off-shoring are coming to an end. Resource optimization is the future for achieving cost savings").
• Environmental regulation will certainly increase and companies will need to document, track and report their compliance for emissions and waste reductions (as well as potentially monetize their reduced carbon emissions)
• Consumers are becoming aware of and requesting information on corporate sustainability efforts. Brand value will depend on providing transparency into sustainability initiatives.

Sustainability applications will be SaaS

Clearly, companies (both large and small) are already on the move to decrease large expenditures on in-house projects and software installations with a fifth of all enterprises planning to have no internal IT assets by 2012. Instead the move is to cloud computing and SaaS - with no software to install or maintain or upgrade.

So it is a no-brainer to predict that on-premise solutions for sustainability will be rare. Instead businesses (and consumers) will be looking for SaaS solutions that can be easily accessed by employees from desktops, laptops or smartphones.

Since SaaS is inherently "connected in the cloud", a sustainability service can be effectively designed across organizational boundaries, incorporating the entire extended enterprise - partners, suppliers and customers.

Success depends on much time people devote to use

The other no-brainer is that user experience will make or break these SaaS applications. They key to making sustainability applications work, is how compelling and easy they are for users to enter information, how well they are on-boarded, and how easy it is track the impact (visually including mapping, as well as numerically). The user interface should be designed around a clear conceptual model, high value scenarios with desktop levels of performance using RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

I'll write more about the sustainability topic in the future, but if you were wondering what the application design crystal ball holds for 2010 (and beyond), think SaaS-based energy and environmental optimization software with a compelling cross-device user interface.