IA Summit - Key Session - IA in the design process (E)

"Where does IA fit in the design process" was one session I'd label as an important "key session of the IA Summit 2007" because understanding this subject means a great impact in our daily user centered design life. It's interesting to notice that also in many other companies and agencies the concerning of IA in context of the design process seems quite modern. The presentations were held by Moderator: Peter Boersma. Panellists: Larisa Warnke, Peter Merholz, Livia Labate, Leisa Reichelt and Josh Seiden and their discussion topics were about...

• IA deliverables,
  
• IAs in the design team,
  
• IAs in interdisziplinary teams,
  
• comunication of IA processes to newbies and
  
• how to improve design processes.

Here are the summaries that I took out of this panel session:
Lisa Reichelt - "Waterfall is bad - washing machine is good"



Livia Labate - "Balance user needs and business goals to conceive solutions which enable positive experience"
Peter Boersma - panel Moderator for following questions:

• What is a design process?
• Who needs a design process?
• When should IAs be part of the design process?
• Where do you keep your design process?
• How do you communicate a design process?
• Why should you create a design process?
  

Larisa Warnke - "Pictures of my process - 4 phases and 9 Disciplines"
Josh Seiden - "Process...is never the goal, ...makes our work visible, ...driven by project parameters and goals"
Peter Merholz

Medical Usability (E)

In my search for some more IA berries I found this interesting german website labeled Medical Usability.
It caught my attraction since I'm always interested on the focus of other Usability Experts, IAs or UX Designers within a special market field. Peter Morville always mentiones the Medical oriented field in his books and speeches as a high performing and, at least in the US, an industry that uses IA and User Experience Design competence to strengthen their wordwide competitiveness.
Most of the US Healthcare Companies are in process or established already IA departments in order to drive process and workflow oriented strategies of their information environments.

Medical or Healthcare business, as one of the most growing markets and industries, certainly is a very potential field for IAs worldwide. What I'm finding worth reading in Ulf Schubert's blog Medical Usability is his focus on subjects like these:
- Search Form Usability
- Usability of Educational Websites
- Eyetracking
- Evaluating the ROI
- Search Mental Model
- Design Patterns
- Interaction Modeling
- User Experience
- Prototyping Tools
- User Oriented Design
- and many more ...