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User 1, a male with little background experience in medicine, started with the Doctor doctor role. He quickly knew to tap the patient's name and "Add Medication". He stumbled on the format of the "Frequency" field, but otherwise handled the "Add Medication" dialog box well. He seemed to quickly understand that the "X" next to each row of medication removed that row. He scanned the "Add Medication" dialog box for patient allergy information, and explicitly mentioned that he couldn't find the information he was looking for before realizing he had to return to the previous screen to learn about the patient. The user then switched roles to evaluate the nurse scenario. He brought up an interesting difficulty: he was unsure if the interface represented actions that would be performed automatically, or if they were actions that were his responsibility. He also had a little bit of difficulty understanding what tapping the medication pane should do. User 2, a Otherwise, he completed the nurse role without issue or pause.
To be expanded.
Analysis
User 1's troubles with finding the patient information while prescribing a new medication led us to consider the role of the patient information sidebar, and the value of context in our interface. Our eventual conclusion was that the patient information sidebar provided context which was valuable in any mode of the interface we were testing, and we decided to have the sidebar present and visible throughout all of the screens (adding consistency and context). User 1 also had interesting comments on the representation of responsibility in the interface.
The first three users alike all stumbled in some way on the "Add Medication" " form, indicating some need for updating the way the fields collect information. Our initial revision had the "Frequency", "Start", and "End" fields as free-form text boxes, but we quickly realized that a richer, more structured input method for these fields could reduce confusion.
To be expanded.
Prototype documentation
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Our prototype represented three screens of our interface: the overview page, the prescribe page, and the administer page. We used card stock and paper to build the mock-ups, and we added interactive elements on top of the printed base layers.
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Iterations
Our prototypes underwent two rounds of iteration throughout the testing period.
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A minor iteration came after the second test user, when we decided to explicitly rename the "Add Medication" button to "Give Medication" for the nurse role. This change introduced the first difference between the doctor and nurse views of the Overview screen, but, after careful analysis, we believe concluded that differing interfaces might be ideal.
The second round of iterations focused on the input format of the "Add Medication" form. Specifically, , we switched from free-form text boxes to more structured inputs for the "Frequency", "Start", and "End" fields. For "Frequency", we supplied a drop-down with choices for the frequency, and for "Start" and "End", we supplied a date-time picker. This reduces confusion about the formatting of the text in those fields.
To be expanded.
Notes from presentation
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