We spend a lot of time fostering an inclusive space at Table XI, but until recently, we hadn’t made a point of building accessible software. It’s something we all wanted to pursue from both a development and design perspective, because it pushes us to improve our craft and serves the disability community. A lot of us also have personal ties to people with disabilities and it’s frustrating to build things that people you love can’t use.
Table XI Blog
Software Development
You absolutely can have too much data.
Like when you’re sorting through messages trying to figure out where exactly an API call went wrong. Or when you’re paying for more and more cloud data storage with less and less performance.
DevOps needs data to be successful. It drives the logic telling our automations when and how to fire, and the KPIs telling us if what we’re doing is really working. And there’s never been more of it. As good as we are at collecting data, however, we’re not always as successful at storing, accessing and analyzing it.
This article was written by Kate Smith with support from Table XI.
Medical software design has grown up, moved out, and left the clinic behind. With the application of new technology, innovative software products are shifting our healthcare experience from the traditional episodic doctor-in-clinic context to one where healthcare is an omnipresent part of our everyday lives. Our healthcare interactions now include a breadth of new experiences like smartphone apps, connected devices, retail interactions, home health delivery kits and telehealth video conferencing. Patients have come to expect that healthcare will meet them in their homes and on their phones. Now, more than ever, software design for medical devices must focus on the patient experience in the context of everyday life.
Unfortunately, most business leaders find out why DevOps is important the hard way.
Like when you get a huge amount of publicity and surge of new visitors to your site, only to have things collapse under the sudden load. Instead of impressing a slew of new visitors — and potentially converting them to longtime users — you disappoint them with a blank server-error page. Not only do you lose the opportunity, you make anyone who remembers the experience less likely to click the next time.
Getting to the ideation process in the double diamond method of design thinking starts to dial up the excitement. By this step, you have had a whole team of different subject matter experts soaking in the details of the user. You all have a clear picture of who you are building for and what problems they are facing.
Now you get to invent things.
Getting a development team in the user’s headspace is half the battle toward good software design. In the double diamond method, we discussed the value of finding out what problem a user is facing before trying to build something. A product without a clear pain point to alleviate will have trouble finding an audience.
Defining a problem statement puts you on the path to building something people will use. As your team continues on the next convergent and divergent paths of the double diamond, you will use this problem statement as the guidepost for your users’ point of view. One of the best ways to help define the problem statement is by building an empathy map.
Healthcare tech solutions often don’t need to reach the most users to make a meaningful impact. They just need to make lives better. Smaller audiences don’t necessarily mean smaller profits for those that invest in healthcare technology — it just means the rules for navigating it can be different than the usual startup playbook.
Healthcare tech solutions tend to take longer to come to fruition than other industries, for example. It can be a tricky channel to navigate digital upgrades due to the red tape and regulations in the medical world. Still, most healthcare companies are working toward digital solutions to streamline the varied pain points their customers have.
At Table XI, we work to learn everything we can about the businesses we work with. In healthcare, that means talking to industry leaders about how they approach technology, and how consultants like us can work best with them. Dr. Elif Oker — senior healthcare executive, Blue Cross Blue Shield alum and founder of InSun Solutions, a health care and technology advisory focused on increasing the success rate of healthcare tech — walked us through her perspective on how healthcare and software can come together.
When we started experimenting with Docker and Kubernetes, we were just looking for a more efficient way to stand up our applications. Traditionally, it’s an infrastructure or operations team’s responsibility to make sure every dependency an application needs to run is set up the server, and that none of them are in conflict — and then continue to ensure that throughout the life of the system. It’s also their responsibility to figure out which server the application need to go on in the first place.
It’s weird to call a process a perk, but our focus on reusable code is one of my favorite things about working at Table XI. Limiting ourselves to the absolute fewest number of components to build software is a challenge, and it’s one that’s made me a better developer.
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