Friday Q&A: Jim Richardson of Electronic Ink, Philly’s “best kept secret”

If you’ve ever kept a cheat sheet or post-it note by your desk to help you navigate your company’s bloated software, Electronic Ink wants to help.

“A lot of software is given to coders without any consideration of the end user and how they want to use the application,” says Jim Richardson VP of business development at Electronic Ink and a Temple grad.
Electronic Ink, located a stone’s throw from City Hall, is a design firm that helped IBM design OS/2 and helped Citibank create and design the first ATM machines.
“Think about it,” says Richardson of the design challenges posed by ATMS, “getting people to move from the bank lobby to the corner without any training [is remarkable].”
The company of roughly 100 employees specializes in helping businesses simplify applications and software, often through simple design tweaks to help end users stop from pulling their hair out and to help save companies money. The company has racked up hundreds of clients since its early days of ATM design.
We chatted with Richardson about making financial markets safer through design, saving one utility company millions and why his firm plans to no longer be Philadelphia’s best kept secret.

 
 
 
 
 

Jim Richardson, VP of Biz Dev at Electronic Ink

Well, I’ve been here two months and it’s interesting. The biggest challenge is moving from being one of 22,000 to a more entrepreneurial environment [of 100 employees].
For people who don’t know, can you sum up what Electronic Ink does?

We are a design firm that focuses on improvement and making technology usable for end users. We get in the middle between the technology and the user and bring a layer of design to the business process that allows the user to use to the technology as intended… our focus is to make technology useful.
Can you give us an example?
I’ll give you two that resonate pretty clearly. We were hired by [a large stock exchange] to help them bring a level of sanity and usefulness to their fraud detection software. These specialists would monitor thousands of buy/sell trades every hour as tabular data – in the form of home-grown Excel worksheets. They called us in, and we were able to recognize not what they wanted, but what they needed was a more visual system that allowed them to see trends in a graphical format.
The second example is that we were hired by [a utility company] that manages the energy grid in 14 states. They had these engineers that were stations at a circular desk that and were surrounded by seven monitors looking at the distribution of power across the grid. They found that a single human could not absorb all that data and keep the distribution of that power within pre-defined high and low metrics. If anyone grid got [out of whack], PJM was being fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We then developed a cheap graphical representation of the data on a single monitor where they can quickly see how power is being used. Since then, the fines have gone down exponentially.

It sounds like Electronic Ink is a design firm in the broadest sense of the word. Sometimes we think design as images on a screen, but this is design as it applies to everything.
I like to describe it as design around business process… We had a client where we changed the term “remuneration” to “paycheck” to increase use. Some of these are very simple.
Can I say that all I can think of throughout these examples is: “I wish these guys would tackle SEPTA?”
[laughs] Give us a name and we’ll talk to the folks at SEPTA.
How does Electronic Ink interact with the robust design community here in Philadelphia? How come we haven’t heard much from Electronic Ink?
Hopefully we’ll change that in the next couple weeks to make it so we are no longer the city’s best kept secret.
Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia s technology community. See others here.