In this episode, Ksenia Samokhvalova — UX designer at InterSystems — joins the podcast to talk about the user experience for InterSystems products and how her team strives to improve that experience through smart design.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 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 found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Ksenia Samokhvalova, a User Experience Designer here at InterSystems, to talk about the user experience of InterSystems products.

Derek Robinson 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 Ksenia Samokhvalova. Ksenia 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.

Derek Robinson 00:01:12 All right. And welcome to the podcast Ksenia. Ksenia, how's it going?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:01:14 Hi, Derek. I'm great. How are you?

Derek Robinson 00:00: Good, good. We're glad to have you on the podcast for a different topic, I think. A lot of times we cover features and the basics of how to use it, or understanding what it is. And I think today is a little bit of a different flavor, so definitely going to 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.

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:01:37 Absolutely. I am a User Experience Designer, and what I do is I

help our development teams develop applications that are easy to use, and that solve our users' problems and pain points. And I also help our developers to learn and understand their users better: learn about the user's workflows, pain points, struggles, goals, that sort of thing.

Derek Robinson 00:02:07 Nice. And so I think that kind of gives a high-level view of what

you're doing. What about your team — is this something that you run yourself? Do you have a team, and if there's a team, what is the approach, and what's your main goal and focus as a team?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:02:21 Yes. So we now have a UX team at InterSystems. 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 InterSystems products, from TrakCare and HealthShare to data platforms. And I am focusing on data platforms right now. We do the work of helping with creating intuitive interfaces and learning about our users.

Derek Robinson 00:02:54 And actually 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, people often jump straight to the graphical user interface, right? The flashy, the pretty, you know, in my head, it pops in like Google Material Design and things like that. So is that really the ma...