By John Escobedo

You've experienced it before, with anything from an app to a kitchen utensil. That feeling that says, "This is like an extension or augmentation of myself." Maybe you've felt the opposite and felt a tool was doing more harm than good in a daily task.
 
Human Centered Design likely played a role (or failed to) in any device, tool, or software that you use in daily life. Today’s managers and product owners create and follow processes and procedures to make sure daily operations happen smoothly. With an existing product, it’s easy to hone a set of behaviors that achieves good results. However, applying this to designing a new product can be more complex. How do you make sure a new product or service meets its user's needs? How can you make sure you're building something for the right audience?
 
One such methodology is Human Centered Design. It was pioneered by Bill Moggridge who was the cofounder of the design company named IDEO. They have created a website at www.designkit.org which teaches and advocates the use of Human Centered Design. 
 
What exactly is it? It’s a set of activities, frameworks, and protocols that encourage empathy towards the intended user. Ideally creating a product that best serves the audience in mind. It's tempting to compare it to working methods such as Scrum or Agile. However, those are meant to maximize results being done by a team while Human Centered Design is focused on never losing sight of and staying connected to the audience for which you are creating a product or service.

​How does it work? Human Centered Design takes many forms but I will focus on the methodologies described on www.designkit.org. The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design prefaces any distinct steps with sharing their seven mindsets: Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, and Learning from Failure. From the beginning it emphasizes that it is an organic process that is not meant to be a cookie-cutter solution to rigid problems. That being said, there are three phases that are described to help you guide your design and keep it human-centric: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.
 
The Inspiration phase is where you not only define your audience, but also conduct interviews. As strongly as, "What are we building?" Human Centered Design makes you ask, "Who are we building this for?" It's a time to walk around in the shoes of your potential customers and ensure you understand their needs.
 
After gathering knowledge, you are ready for the Ideation phase. This knowledge needs to be analyzed and broken down into what can become concrete solutions. But first, you'll brainstorm and storyboard these ideas and see which have a real and supported possibility of working for your audience. After deeply researching the "who" and the "what" behind your product, you enter the Implementation phase. You'll start to build prototypes of things you want to make and a plan for how to build them, as well as how to define when you've succeeded. If these steps leave you stalling for what to do next, www.designkit.org has a number of methods for each of these phases to break any writer's block you may have. Some of these methods include "Conversation Starters" for the Inspiration phase, "Gut Check" for the Ideation Phase, and "Roadmap" for the Implementation Phase.
 
What's important to remember is that Human Centered Design is a set of tools and mindsets to steer you in the direction of designing for your audience. It places those who you will design for at the center of the process rather than a single creator in charge of all choices. Much like any framework, it's up to you to adhere to or ignore the guidelines it sets forth.

The next time you are using your favorite app, frustrated while searching in a store, or struggling with a new tool, you'll find that Human Centric Design can make a difference in your daily life.

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Research Administrative Management System (RAMS) is part of the VA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which works to improve the health and wellbeing of veterans. To do this, ORD focuses on the healthcare needs of veterans, research is done to identify those needs, and solutions are sought after and developed in response. This research is conducted in clinics and labs across the country by private and public researchers and reported to the ORD through VA-managed portals. ORD provides the public research field with tools to manage protocols, personnel, budgets, and laboratories in order to increase compliance, efficiency, and accuracy of reports, as well as reduce the burden of regulatory oversight on research activities. The work of RAMS allows for cleaner data for ORD, provides consistency for oversight reviews of research being done, and facilitates training and succession. Each field research office funded by ORD must be in compliance with Federal and industry regulations, and the RAMS Integration system tracks office compliance with these regulations through a communication portal specifically for ORD and research offices. This portal is important because the system of the VA ORD is widespread, with several project application and management systems that communicate with each other and with various local and central offices.
 
For the RAMS project, GeekSI provided software development enhancements for the program, specifically for the RAMS Integration project. Labs and clinics are constantly engaged in rigorous research to provide healthcare solutions to veterans, and the outcomes can range from application of patient care, to the installation of new or improved programs.  One of the projects that function through the ORD is the West Haven Center for Restoration of Nervous System Function in West Haven, Connecticut. The goal for this center is to develop new therapeutic approaches to improving the function and quality of life for veterans suffering from nervous system injuries, with specific focus on SCI, MS, and nerve injury. Another ORD-wide program is the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) program. The QUERI program works to improve the quality of healthcare for veterans by implementing research findings into clinical practice. These are great way to see the research funded by the ORD being realized in a practical setting, and the research conducted in these areas are largely self-identified by the researchers, who then justify funding to the ORD. The ORD partners with many institutions to conduct the best research possible, many partners including universities, nonprofit organizations, the private industry, as well as other federal agencies. There are ORD-funded centers across the United States. As an integral part of the VA, the Office of Research and Development relies on an intricate system of budgetary and research project management and tracking applications. RAMS is one such application.
 
Unlike the ORD Legacy systems project that GeekSI also worked on, which assisted ORD portal users in navigating the legacy systems and improved user experience, the RAMS Integration system pertains to enhancing the administration  and management of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process. The IRB is required for conducting human research at the VA and provides a common centralized database for tracking and reporting on VA administrative research programs. The IRB process is in place to enhance the quality of human research by ensuring that the research that labs and clinics are engaged in is ethically sound and put under scientific review to make sure that local issues are addressed and that the research being conducted is beneficial to the health and wellbeing of our veterans. The portal is used in concordance with the various ORD portals, and because of that it requires sufficient server space to exchange numerous tools and resources, many of which contain multiple graphics and require large amounts of storage capacity. Due to the large bulk of information being stored within the RAMS Integration portal, the dedication to the administration of support was great. The RAMS Integration employs a configurable technology based on Microsoft (MS) SharePoint 2013, MS Structured Query Language (SQL) Server R2 Enterprise, MS SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), a custom web user interface (e.g., Java, J2EE), and web services. This solution delivers content management, workflow, and data quality assurance, and improves ORD’s ability to track and report research projects.
 
With RAMS Integration, local research offices can do a number of things, including:

• Create and track administrative data for individual projects that are active or pending at local research sites, and manage research oversight committees and sub-committees;
• Track research personnel assignments;
• Track training requirements, and certifications;
• Manage laboratory space and equipment inventory including, space allocations and equipment and support required reporting to ORD.

 
Along with the RAMS Integration project, GeekSI continues to contribute to the ORD through our work on the ORD Legacy program to help users create profiles in the various ORD portals. The RAMS Integration administrative work GeekSI has done helps contribute to the smooth experience of VA researchers and the research they develop. And, as indirect as the work may seem, we had and continue to have a hand in contributing to the health of our Veterans. We Geeks take pride in creating positive change in our community.