If you don’t know that past, you don’t know the future.

I’ve been working on creating set of best practices for mobile healthcare solutions during the past few months, and it has made me think about the evolution of user experiences and their underlying technology.

Back “in the old days” at the beginning of my career I was designing and testing screens for mainframe Database Applications that mostly ran on 3270 terminals—you know those green screen monitors that you see in 80’s movies.  We applied best practices and our knowledge of theories of cognitive psychology to help developers create the best interfaces possible, given the technological constraints.

Then Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs came out in force.  Everyone was scrambling to get existing applications ported to this new platform.  This was an exciting time, as the PC was really taking off, and the Windows 3.x environment was exploding and personal computers were slowing becoming more and more available to the masses.

We (user experience professionals) made some serious mistakes in the first few generations of UI’s.  Most likely because we did not have a full understanding of the capabilities of the new environments (who did?) we ended up “porting” the existing interface to the new platform.  It wasn’t until the third or forth release of these products did we start to take advantage of the more interactive nature of the Windows-based client GUIs (actually I was working with OS/2, but that is a different story all-together.)   As this platform grew and became more and more powerful, we began to focus on the graphics, and included multimedia computing—namely audio, video and touch into our designs.  Good stuff!

At around the same time, desktop publishing was taking off, as companies like Aldus (Pagemaker) and Ventura Publishing were reshaping the print media industry.  Page layout and print design became common tasks performed by graphic designers, technical writers and others who no longer hard to rely on expensive outsourcing their print needs.

I build my first client website in 1995 or so for a divorce lawyer in the Silicon Valley  (I think it was SJDivorce.com). I suspect that a good many of the first websites for companies were created by desktop publishers that had an inkling for something different.  These early sites, much like the 3270 applications ported to the GUI platform, were mostly online versions of print brochures.   Just like the situation a few years back, we didn’t know the technology, and pretty much “ported” yellow pages ads to an HTML format.  Eventually as browsers became more and more powerful and scripting languages, such as javascript, became prevalent websites became web applications and the DOT COM boom (and bust) happened.

When broadband Internet became widely available the web took off again, but this time, with a deeper understanding of its technology, limits and an understanding of users it launched the real Internet revolution.  Companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Facebook made billions connecting us to information and to ourselves by re-inventing ways that some thought of long ago, but the technology was not able to support.

Enter mobile ubiquitous Internet.  The first set of mobile applications, or “apps” were websites that were “ported” to the handheld device.  Because of the smaller form-factor, these apps were made smaller and simpler, not because of some usability issues, but mostly so that the information can fit on the screen!

At some recent UX conferences I’ve attended sessions outlining best practices in mobile UX design that provided some great Mobile App design information.  But, to me, this information lacks the knowledge of the mistakes of the past.  Not specific mistakes of the past, but specifics about the technology of the future.

We are currently at the “elbow” of the exponential growth curve of mobile, connected applications.  In my mind, in order for a mobile application to be successfully, it needs to fully embrace the connected mobile technology and the power that a ubiquitous network, along with a touch screen, a GPS, an accelerometer, a camera, Bluetooth enabled, along with serious amounts of computing power and data (and cloud) storage.

OK, so now I am back to my thoughts on mobile applications for healthcare.  Location aware is a must.  Connecting to the fastest network available given the current location seems doable.  Updating things in the background while the clinician is walking down the hall—sounds nice.  Using barcodes, and/or QR codes for linking to databases, okay that sounds right.  Wirelessly connect to medical devices via Bluetooth and analyzing the data in real time (like an EKG) – awesome.

So when you designing mobile applications for healthcare, make sure you don’t make the same mistakes as in the past.  Figure out what the device can do and design to fully exploit it—don’t settle for the least common denominator port to the new platform.  We know the past, we know the technology, so lets make the future!