Tuesday, September 25, 2007
World Usability Day's Healthcare Focus: Thoughts about health care user-experience design...
The theme of the 2007 World Usability Day is healthcare. This event aims to create awareness about the need for user-centered design within the health care system. Here is some information posted on UPA's World Usability Community blog:
"..."The importance of user-centered design in healthcare is truly about life and death” noted Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Founder and Director of World Usability Day. “Whether it’s new medical devices or technologies; drug research, approval or delivery; patient forms or medical record sharing; emergency disaster planning or increasing the functionality of hospitals and everyday healthcare delivery, everyone is effected in some way by the intersection of usability and healthcare. There are many commonalities, yet each region of the world faces its own set of unique challenges. We believe that focusing World Usability Day 2007 on healthcare will create a stronger awareness of these issues and lead to initiatives that have long term impact on the quality of everyone’s life".
Information about World Usability Day:
www.worldusabilityday.org.
Usability and interaction with the health care system has become a personal interest of mine, as I've spent the better part of the past month assisting a close relative negotiate three hospital stays, a couple of surgeries, numerous medical tests, and visits to various medical professionals. This has been an eye-opening experience, as anyone who has followed a similar path would agree.
I propose that efforts to improve usability should consider using some of the strategies employed by user-experience designers, taking into consideration that the definition of "user" includes the patient/consumer, the patient's family and social support network, health care professionals, hospital and medical staff, health educators, researchers, and so forth.
When I have the chance, I'll post some of my observations and thoughts related to this topic.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Usability/Interaction Hall of Shame (In a Hospital)
What were they thinking?
Here is an example of a user-unfriendly interactive touch-screen map on an information kiosk at a large hospital:
An information kiosk that looks like it was torn up by a frustrated hospital visitor:
Here is a picture of a hospital bed/TV remote control in my dad's hospital room. The TV channels could only scroll up, so if you were on Channel 6 and you wanted Channel 5, you had to go up through the remainder of the stations! If you hit a button, different hospital room lights would turn off and on without warning.
For more information about good (and bad) usability design, take a look at the World Usability Day 2007 website.
The following excerpt is from the "making life easy" website from World Usability Day 2006:
"Confusing cash machines, unclear signs, frustrating websites - poor usability is everywhere and it gets in the way of life. Sometimes it is just annoying. At other times it stops us doing what we need to do.
It can even be dangerous.
World Usability Day is an international event promoting the message that people have had enough of things that are hard to use."
