400 Bad request

In June I started contracting for Kareo and as of 1st October I’ve taken a position as their Interaction Designer in Irvine, CA.

Kareo, who are they?

Kareo develop healthcare software. Specifically they help small practices and doctors get paid with their medical billing software. Think of it as an invoice system for doctors, but 100 times more complicated than any other invoice system.

For the past few years they’ve been increasing their market share with a desktop application. Now, with their recent investment, Kareo look to take things to a new level focusing on user experience and developing new web, desktop and mobile products that help their customers.

Interaction Designer

As Interaction Designer I form part of the Product Team, working closely with the Director of Product and Engineering team.

The type of stuff I get to do on a daily basis includes:

• Customer visits and research
• Product ideas and discovery
• User flows and wireframes
• Designing prototypes
• User testing
• UI design for web and mobile
• Markup (HTML/CSS)

Goodbye freelancing

As much as I love the freedom of freelancing, I felt it was time to take that next step.

There are a number of benefits working full time with a product company, that you miss out on as a freelancer, or even doing client work:

• Spend more time getting to know the customer
• Extensive prototyping and user testing
• Measure project results, and continue to iterate based on ongoing feedback
• See a product evolve through the product development life cycle
• Work with a team of talented people with different skills and learn from that team
• Be part of and responsible for the success (or failure) of a product
• Focus on the quality of work I’m producing without having to worry about billable hours

Of course there are disadvantages, and I will miss choosing what projects to work on, less meetings, being my own boss and sleeping in, but I’m really looking forward to contributing to the success of Kareo.

Some recent Kareo work

Kareo has done a great job to get to where they are today, but coming from a UX designer’s point of view there’s definitely room for improvement.

Anything I’ve been working on so far isn’t public facing yet, but you can keep an eye on some of the stuff I’m working on via Dribbble.

It’s a new challenge that I’m really looking forward to.

A short story about a safe

Recently I was staying in a hotel and like most hotels it had a safe in the room. To activate the safe I had to dial in a pin number of my choice and press the lock button.

I put my valuables into the safe, keyed in a 4-digit number and hit the big green button. But it didn’t lock. Instead it cleared the pin I entered.

I then read what the buttons said and the green button actually said ‘Clear’ and red said ‘Lock’.

Colour association

We associate colours with various actions in our everyday life. Green tends to stand for good, and red for bad. On a traffic light, for example, green means go and red means stop.

In the case of the safe above, I expected to type in a number and hit the green button to indicate that I was good to go. I based this decision on other interactions in everyday life, for example, taking money out of an ATM where I would enter a 4 digit pin and hit the green button. I did this automatically, without even reading what the buttons said.

I don’t think there’s either of us at fault here, we just interpreted the colour in different ways. The safe manufacturer probably assumed red means secure, where as I thought it meant error and green meant confirm.

Applying colour to web interaction

We can use this technique in our designs too, assigning different colours to different actions.

Using red for delete or cancel actions may make it quicker for your user to make an association with that link. Likewise, green can be associated with an add or save action.

Lets look at LinkedIn for example. Here are the actions associated with someone requesting to be connected to me.

But what if we gave these actions some colour association.

To me this cuts down the amount of time a user has to spend reading the action text. Instead, they are able to visually identify the green link and assume by clicking it will be a confirm action.

What are your thoughts on associating colours with actions and have you any good examples?