11. User Experience at InterSystems (Ksenia Samokhvalova)

Speaker 0 00:00:02 Welcome to data points, a podcast by InterSystems learning services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast. App links can be [email protected] I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Cassinia. <inaudible> a user experience designer here at InterSystems to talk about the user experience of InterSystems products. Speaker 1 00:00:25 <inaudible> Speaker 0 00:00:39 Welcome to episode 11 of data points by InterSystems learning services on today's episode. As I mentioned in the intro, I'm joined by Cassinia some Mafalda Cassinia is on the UX team here at InterSystems. And the conversation with her is an interesting one for a few reasons. First, it's a bit different than most episodes of data points, where we cover a feature area or technology concept and learn about how that feature is used here. We're talking about the approach to use your experience around those products and technologies. All right. And welcome to the podcast. Cassinia Ksenia. How's it going? Good. Good. We're glad to have you on the podcast for a different topic. I think than a lot of times we'd cover features and like kind of the basics of like how to use it or understanding what it is. And I think today is a little bit of a different flavor, so, um, definitely gotta be an exciting conversation to have and to share with our learners. So let's jump right in and first, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at InterSystems. Speaker 2 00:01:37 Absolutely. I am a user experience designer and, um, what they do is I help our development teams, um, develop, uh, applications that are easy to use and that solve our users problems and pinpoints. And I also help our developers to learn and understand their users better and, uh, uh, learn about the user's workflows pain points, struggles, goals, that sort of thing. Speaker 0 00:02:07 Nice, nice. And so I think that kind of gives a high level view of what you're doing. What about your team, you know, is this, so is this kind of something that you run yourself? Do you have a team and if there's a team kind of, what is the approach and what's kind of your main goal and focus as a team. Speaker 2 00:02:21 Yes. So we now have a UX team as intro systems. We are relatively new here. We've been around for about two years. It's not a big team, but we do cover the suite of interest systems, products from track here and health share to data platforms. And I am focusing data platforms right now. And, uh, we do the work of helping with, uh, creating intuitive interfaces and yeah. Learning about our users. Speaker 0 00:02:54 And so, uh, actually that your answer is a good segue into the next question I was going to ask cause you intuitive interfaces. So when we're talking about UX UI stuff, um, people often jump straight to the graphical user interface, right? The, the, the flashy, the pretty, you know, in my head, it pops in like Google material design and things like that. Um, so is that really the main focus of what we're talking about or is there more to it when it comes to the inner system specific approach to you? Speaker 2 00:03:21 That's a great question. So a lot of people, like you mentioned, think off of the, the, when they say UI, they saying gooey is so we're talking the forums and the screens and the buttons. And, uh, people think about making things pretty and making colors nice. But a lot of what we do is also API work. And so we developed API APIs for our developer users, and those also need to be intuitive and easy to use. I think it's now becoming clear that you need to make the API APIs also also streamlined for the users. So it's not no longer the case that it's cool and prestigious to know this obscure a language that is hard to use and you need to spend hours and months and years of your life figuring out. Now we have developers who just need to hit the ground running. So we've been working for example, on making a IRS first experience of IRS, easy to use and making it easy to just start going with IRS start coding. So it's, it's these ability of, uh, API is becoming more and more important, I think. And this is what I've been working on in addition to working on the graphical user interfaces is API, right? Speaker 0 00:04:51 Yes. I think that's a good, uh, way to look at it. And I think, um, to tie this in with some of the other, you know, things we've covered on this podcast, I know that one topic that I've been involved in, in InterSystems that I think crosses over into your area. When you talk about testing the are really assessing and evaluating the usability of an API is integrated ML, right? One of the new features of InterSystems, Iris, can you talk a little bit about what your team has done in that area as far as like an example of working on the UX of an API versus a user interface? Speaker 2 00:05:21 Right. So yes, uh, we have worked on, um, usability testing, integrated as a mail API, and I'm happy to report that. We were able to see that indeed that core API, that we were hoping was intuitive and it was designed to be intuitive, was in fact easy for users to understand. So they were able to, for example, read the code that they've never seen before and understand what the code was doing. And then they were able to use what they have figured out and apply it to a different problem, a different data, and be able to use the API. Um, we also found out by talking to them during the sessions of that users really wanted to know a little more about what kind of model this cool integrated the Mel has come up with. And so we're now working on exposing more of that information in the interface, and that's something you would learn from talking to people. Speaker 2 00:06:28 And, uh, it was really, it was really cool to observe people use this. And those were people who have never seen it before, but they were our target audience. So people who are equal developers, but somebody who's not to in machine learning experts. But they're curious about machine learning because it's a whole thing now and they didn't really help them in their work. Uh, so they were able to use this interface and, uh, that was really good to see. And I think that was one of the first times we've done this kind of work at interest system, which was also really cool. And actually the team also was able to see the value of involving users early versus waiting for the feedback. One of the things that you find out is that if you wait for that feedback to come, sometimes you will never hear about usability issues. Speaker 2 00:07:20 So users are not really forthcoming reporting usability issues. First of all, they're not experts on that. So they don't think about it. And, uh, secondly, they are reluctant to complain that they couldn't understand something because they tend to blame themselves and think, Oh, I should have read that the commentation, I should have spent more time on it. And I think it's our job and my job as a UX designer to help them and come up with the, was the interface that is intuitive to use. So they don't have to spend the time reading something for hours trying to comprehend it. Speaker 0 00:07:59 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. That's really interesting. And I think, um, I think in the course of that answer, you sort of touched on another thing that I was going to be asking you is I'll, I'll kind of roll two questions into one here, which is, you know, it sounds like the way by what you get this information is these user tests, right? Like you, you invite users to test something and, and walk them through different parts of, of what you're really assessing and see how they viewed the usability. Um, so combined with, you can talk a little bit about that process, but also talk about the, to the average person at InterSystems, right? You, you know, a developer or a support engineer or a product manager, they might think that, you know, that they can just kind of do that testing themselves, right? Like I can look at this product and know whether this is usable or not. So talk a little bit about the process of bringing in users to test, and then also why that's different than people who are embedded around the product all the time, assessing it themselves. Speaker 2 00:08:52 Right? Absolutely. So the process that we use to, to see how usable this interface is there several different methods that have we have in our toolbox, we can actually just heuristically evaluate the interface. And I assess it ourselves as user experience professionals. And this could also be done by somebody who is not a UX person, given the set of characteristics like, uh, you know, do we rely too much on some concepts that are not in the interface? For example, you can assess this, the interface, uh, as an expert, but, um, usability testing specifically is the technique way you in the, via a, a target your target user in for a session and you give them a set of tasks. And I asked them as a facilitator to please try to do these tasks using the interface. And we observed them trying to complete those tasks. Speaker 2 00:09:55 And generally we keep quiet. So we let them work and we ask them to think aloud and tell us what they're thinking. So they might not be necessarily telling us, Oh, this is hard to do, or this is hard to use, but by observing them do it, you can infer that this was really painful, even if they're literally saying nothing about it. So you can see that they're struggling, um, by just watching the work, which is really invaluable saying, and something that is hard to do otherwise because we are not being shipped with our product, right. So we can, we can be there and looting over somebody's shoulder as they use it for the first time or for the hundredth time. And try to understand what they're thinking. So we approximate that by inviting them in early and asking them to do it. So as for your second part of your question about us as interest systems, as developers, uh, parts of development team can redo this assessment. Speaker 2 00:11:04 So it's, it's a great question. I think specifically for, um, interfaces that are targeted at developers. Sometimes people think, well, I'm a developer too. Yes, I work here, but I know SQL and I should be able to, to assess how is, is this to use? So what I like to remind people, and this, this needs to get internalized then eventually it's does is that we are not the users, but you can have the skills that the users have maybe. So they know SQL, you know, well maybe, you know, it at the same level, but your goal as the developer at the interest systems is to develop the software that's interest system itself. Right? But the goal about users is not that their goal is to build their application. In our case, for data platforms, they could have their own users and customers. And so their goal is not to write software. Speaker 2 00:12:11 Their goal is to solve their user's problems. And so that distinction and the goal, and then the mindset is very important. It turns out because we live and breathe out technology here, but our users might not, and that doesn't make them bad users or, uh, you know, they have not incompetent. They're very competent at what they do it, but their goal is to not use our software there isn't a day out just like you. And I don't show up to work every morning and think, Oh, I'm going to use some, some, uh, male clients today. That will be fun. Right. You know, but we use it and we're proficient at it because when you get our work done and that application helps us. So it's similar, similar for us and, uh, IRS and our technology, you know, our users have their own, uh, problems to solve, and we need to understand what they are and they are different from our problems and pain points. Speaker 2 00:13:12 So that understanding is really important. And being able to know what the struggles are or what they're trying to do, um, is something you really get by talking to them and it could be used at, during usability tests, but there's also interviews that we do, uh, where we talk to people about what they do and what their use cases are. They can walk us through the workflow, they can show us in the tool. What exactly is it doing? Which is usually worth a thousand words. We can kind of walk the walk with them through the day-to-day, uh, life, use it now, tools and that's super valuable. Right? Speaker 0 00:13:53 Yeah. That's interesting. I think. Um, and so you, you drew a lot of good comparisons about even with the same skill set, two different people have vastly different approaches and, and main goals for using the software. And I think you, you explained a lot about how, what the process is for getting these users, uh, feedback and everything. Now for the people listening, how can they give their own feedback? How can they get involved in this process, if they are an inner systems user who has feedback about UX, or would like to participate in these types of, of research, gathering, um, studies and sessions and things like that, how can they learn more? Speaker 2 00:14:25 Uh, yes. Uh, great question. So we are, um, running these sessions, uh, um, all the time now, which is really great. And in the description for this podcast, there's going to be a link to go and fill out a short survey so that we can get in touch with you when we are looking for people to interview and participate in those sessions. And yeah, like I said, there, the usability sessions where we ask you to actually try something we're working on, we say it's usability testing or user testing, but one thing I can't stress enough, we wouldn't be testing you, your abilities, your knowledge, and then way we would be testing the design of our software. So any, and all feedback would be really valuable. It's nothing to be scared off. There's no grade, you can't fail and that's fun. And you get to see something that we're working on and talk to us. Speaker 2 00:15:28 And a lot of people I think have had fun doing that. We also are doing interviews. So that's another thing that we have going on. So you can sign up, uh, and we'll get in touch with you when we have an appropriate project. Also, if you're a member of our developer community, keep an eye out for, uh, announcements that we post. We post both in the developer community and as global masters, sometimes there are challenges and, uh, you can sign up. Usually there's some kind of surveys just trying to see kind of as your skill sets match what's we are looking for, but generally speaking, uh, there's lots of opportunities, uh, to participate. And I hope you do, because we really do want to hear from you and nothing replaces talking to actual users. You know, we, we've been, um, thinking about the usability a lot and, uh, we can be the most powerful database on the market and be easy and intuitive to use those things are not mutually exclusive so we can do it. And that's why UX team is now as inter systems and we're trying to make this happen. So Speaker 0 00:16:42 Absolutely. So hopefully people follow that link and give your feedback on that. So Cassinia thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time. Speaker 0 00:16:55 Thanks again to Cassinia for joining us. What's interesting about this discussion to me is how it breaks into a new category of UX in my mind, beyond what we typically think of which entails graphical interfaces and visual items, InterSystems products, don't always have a lot of graphical user interfaces, and it's not really necessarily an end user consumer product. It's mostly used by developers, building applications for their clients. And so the user experience is much different than what we often think of with user experiences, for web design or mobile apps or different end user products. So I thought it was interesting. And as Cassinia mentioned, you can follow the links in the podcast description to get involved in the UX process yourself and have your voice heard by the UX team. So that'll do it for episode 11. We'll see you next time on data points.