Jeff Horvath's Page

The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released the third round of their reports on US children’s use of media. It’s an impressively comprehensive report which delves in to how US kids, age 8-18, use various forms of media such as tv, computers, video games, music players, and more. They also explore many interacting factors such as age, race, gender, school grades, usage rules, etc. to see how those elements interact with use. A lot of the report didn’t surprise me (and probably wouldn’t… Continue

At HFI, we've been exploring the principles of persuasion engineering and persuasive design for a number of years now. We've helped many clients understand the drives and blocks that affect users behavior on their websites and then employed proven design principles to make sure users "will do" when they visit the site. This has been a very powerful addition to the more conventional "can do" aspects of usability. Together, "can do" and "will do" define the larger user experience.



Many… Continue

HFI's been working with clients in the health/medical/pharma space for many many years now. We've helped clients with everything from EMRs to dialysis machines to consumer pharma sites. And so, it's always been clear to us how big a factor user experience (UX) was in determining the success of any health care (I'll use "health care" generically to refer to anything in the health, medical, pharma or other health-related space) venture. Clearly, the recent health care debate here in the U.S. has… Continue

As anyone who hasn't been under a rock for the past year and a half knows, health care reform is a hot topic. Many have made the argument that reforming the health care system is key to the US's economic recovery, and one of the key ways to realizing that the path to reform is through better use of health care IT systems. President Obama explicitly called this out in his inauguration speech.



The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's… Continue

One of the most common things we get asked at HFI, from commercial and government clients alike, is how to measure the ROI for UX activities. We begin many a conversation with new or potential clients by walking them through a discussion of the various different benefits that a UX approach could provide their organization - increased conversion rates, reduction in training costs, improved brand value, etc.



(you can find a nice… Continue