By Amy Sanders Only 12% of the U.S. population have the skills needed to obtain, process, and understand health information (NAAL). This statistic is staggering when you consider how many people consume health information online; according to Pew, 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year. What doesRead… Read more »
By Jessica Havlak While working in what I’ll call the “white hat sector,” it can be a challenge to reach individuals with your message when they are almost as inclined to listen to their friends and family as they are to clinicians. Use this trust of peers to your advantage: engage them in a communityRead… Read more »
By Pete Wilson There is a lot of energy today around innovation in government. This is a good thing. Government agencies, like all large organizations, can fall into a complacent bureaucratic model that fiercely protects established structures, processes, and cultures. When they do, they can become unresponsive to the evolving needs of customers, partners, andRead… Read more »
By Jillian Pugatch, MPH The ubiquity of social media compels us to devise unique ways to use it. We are challenged to go beyond the simple post-and-reply format that is commonly used in social media platforms in order to achieve specific outcomes. To rise to this challenge, ICF’s Smokefree.gov social media team piloted a newRead… Read more »
By Cathy Thomas Stop with the task-based approach Have you ever been approached by a client who wants a mobile app but does not have specific requirements, just general goals? That can be a daunting challenge. With mobile apps, ideally there should be opportunities for user interaction and touch gesture feedback beyond simply navigating aroundRead… Read more »
By Pete Wilson, ICF International I am a mobile guy. I spend a good deal of my time traveling from one place to the next to meet with clients and teams, and I rely heavily on my mobile devices. That’s right. I said devices because I use a variety of tools to perform different kindsRead… Read more »
by Andrew Lopresti Failure is not an option. It’s a necessity. If all we ever do is succeed, we have never pushed our own limits. Failure is an important step – and a very liberating one – when interaction designers realize they can miss the mark on something without it being the end of theRead… Read more »
by Mary Schwarz, ICF Interactive Interdisciplinary has always been one of those words that bothered me. Not the actual intent of interdisciplinary – approaching work by involving practitioners from several areas of knowledge – but what it sounds like. So many ways to be disciplined or punished … will it be writing lines, scrubbing gumRead… Read more »