Capgemini presentation: CHI in action

Last Tuesday professor Duval invited some people from Capgemini to our lesson to present a mobile project they were working on. The goal was showing that the things we’ve seen in our lessons do apply in the real world. And I must say, they succeeded.

They presented a project for Wit-Gele Kruis Oost-Vlaanderen. The goal of this project was reducing the paper overload of the nursing staff by handing every nurse a tablet pc to manage their paperwork. Off course, the program on the tablet to manage such a job must be very user-friendly, otherwise the staff would lose too much time.

I must say it was interesting to see the approach of the people of Capgemini to create such an application. Concepts like brainstorming, user interviews and wireframes, which we discussed in the lessons, where all used in the creation of the application. They also used an iterative approach by organizing different workshops to let the potential users work with a prototype of the system and improving the system with the results of those workshops. When you compare this to the work we’ve done so far in this course, you can’t deny the similarities.

One important thing I’ve remembered is that you can guide the client as much as you want, sometimes he will make a ‘bad’ decision. The example in the presentation was Adobe Flex. Just because the client hadn’t decided yet what platform they wanted to use, the Capgemini people weren’t allowed to use HTML5, even though their experience learned them that this would be the best choice. But as they say, the client is always right.

I must say that after this presentation, I was even more convinced of the profits of usability engineering. Good user testing can really make or break your application!