Thought Leadership

What happened to Apple's commitment to quality?

I just finished downloading and installing yet another update to the operating system on my Macbook.

People pay a premium price for Apple products and reasonably expect to receive a superior product. A MacBook pro costs $1,299. A comparable HP laptop (the EliteBook 745 ) starts at $749. A 9.7 inch iPad Pro (with 32GB of storage) costs $599, while a 9.7 Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 with 32GB is $499.

Auto bumpers and HealthIT Interoperability

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.

The top 5 EHR usability problems and how to fix them!

This year at HIMSS in Las Vegas there was no shortage of talk about the “lack of usability” in EHRs.  In the final HIMSS16 show daily (Thursday March 3, 2016) there were four articles (“When EHRs cause Harm,” “5 UX steps to Healthy Clinical apps,” “Nurse: We face severe IT usability problems,” and “The leading health IT issues? Poor usability and missing safeguards”) that addressed some aspect of EHR usability.

For The Usability People, LLC the time for talk has long been over.  Many of you already know that we have been on an active campaign--by giving talks at conferences, on social media, and with our many Healthcare clients--to improve the usability of Health IT.  We don’t want more talk, we want to DO SOMETHING about this important healthcare issue.  Usability in healthcare it can save lives. 

 

Age-related Human Factors of Mobile Websites

Mobile Device Users Age Faster Than General Population

-Levy Eymard - VP User Research

The mobile device user has, on average, gotten older at a faster rate than the general population. How can that happen? What does that mean for my website?

Alfred Hitchcock (The Beatles and Pink Floyd) and the future of Health IT

In the classic Alfred Hitchcock film “Rope,” Hitchcock shot continuous scenes for periods lasting up to 10 minutes (the length of the film camera magazine), continuously panning from actor to actor. Every other segment ended by panning against or tracking into an object—such as a man's jacket blocking the entire screen, or the back of a piece of furniture.

In doing this, Hitchcock effectively masked half the cuts in the film.

Shampoo in the shower and Contextual Inquiry

In a post on Linkedin by Kath Straub, she displayed the following photo along with this comment:

Shampoo in the shower

Really. PLEASE put SHAMPOO (or S) in BIG LETTERS on the little bottle so we can tell shampoo from conditioner without glasses in the shower!

ONC Final Rule for 2015 Certification Criteria: Safety-enhanced design

The final rule for the ONC 2015 certification has been released.

The 550+ page document identifies a number of changes from the previously published proposed rule in direct response to a number of comments provided to ONC.

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