Jonathan Abbett

VP of User Experience

Jonathan Abbett is a user experience designer and software engineer who has dedicated his career to serving healthcare providers, researchers, insurers, patients, and families with highly appropriate and highly effective software and technology-enabled services.

Over the last 25 years, he has established innovative user-centered design practices within Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and two startups. As Newfire’s VP of User Experience, Jonathan is passionate about bringing user voices into technology teams, where empathy and evidence can drive meaningful outcomes.

A DESIGN INSPIRATION

I started using a PalmPilot in 1997. In the iPhone era, it’s easy to focus on the device’s limitations, but the industrial design of the hardware and the interaction design of the software both demonstrated truly innovative tradeoffs.

The monochrome display (instead of color) and resistive touch screen (instead of capacitive) achieved affordability and long battery life (on 2 AAA alkalines!).

The interface had a unique “graffiti” script for keyboard-free text entry — more reliable than full-blown handwriting recognition and easy to learn.

Apps were accessible through the UI, but the most critical productivity apps — calendar, address book, to-do list, and memo pad — had dedicated physical buttons, along with page-up and page-down.

With these choices, the Palm team made handheld computing accessible to a wide audience — even my parents had PalmPilots, and kept them running long after cooler devices arrived.