Trends

Quick thought:

Use the persona’s to create realistic use cases based upon the real user's needs that you understand based upon your research. Usability people often call these use cases “user journey maps.”

Now, when you design your app, website or software product to engage the person that has to use it every day-- around their tasks (and not merely to satisfy regulatory requirements) the end users/patients will find the information presented to be easy to understand, useful to them, and they will freely engage with your system.

Ralph Nadar's book Unsafe At Any Speed raised public awareness of some of the safety problems associated with the Chevrolet Corvair.  Nadar’s book, however, was also an indictment of the auto industry as a whole and served as a lightning rod for legislation establishing what would eventually become the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). 

These two industries, HealthIT and automobiles have quite a lot in common including that they are both highly regulated.  These regulations exist because in both industries poor design can lead to safety issues and the possible death of their user’s.

We have seen a number of recent blog posts and tweets complaining about EHRs having ‘too many clicks.’ (and a great video on youtube by ZDoggMD http://zdoggmd.com/ehr-state-of-mind/ '30 clicks for an Ambien?')

A number of people have proclaimed that reducing the number of clicks in an EHR as a method to improve EHR Usability. Multiple clicks are not a deterrent to usability and user satisfaction, in fact there are many occasions where having more clicks may actually improve usability.

Over the past several years we have had the opportunity to work with companies of various sizes as they plan and redesign their web presence. Some began using a CMS for the first time, while others were transitioning from either an open-source system (WP, Drupal, etc.) or some homegrown system to a more robust complete CMS solution (Adobe CQ5, Sitecore, Sharepoint, etc).

We’ve worked with these organizations to help them better understand the mental models of their “End Users” so that together we could design a system that is effective, efficient and satisfying. But who are these “End Users?” One common thread that we’ve noticed is that a majority of these organizations seemed to forget about a number of “end users” by focusing exclusively on the experience of visitors to their sites and their customers.

Don’t get us wrong, we think that it is vital to understand, and design towards the understanding of visitors and customers. We often create personas that help drive that design conversation.

What we are saying is that most of the organizations that we’ve worked with never completely thought about all of the user touch-points they need to consider.