Design

Final Design

Here we present several screenshots of our final design along with a discussion of our key design decisions along the dimensions of Learnability, Efficiency and Safety. It is important to mention up-front that we designed this interface with the idea of a tablet in mind as we felt that the portability of our user interface would improve it's usefulness to the clinical staff. Throughout this interface, we will demonstrate only the doctor's view. The reason for this is because the nurse's view is a subset of the doctor's view. The difference being that the nurse cannot prescribe medications.

...

Here we discuss design decisions we made which were motivated by the three evaluations we did

Paper Prototyping

Issue 1: Users couldn't see patient allergy information when prescribing new medication
Design Fix: Make patient information sidebar visible at all times, providing consistency and context

...

Issue 5: The prescribe medication was a pop-up menu which users found annoying as it blocked parts of the screen they wanted to observe - such as patient information.
Design Fix: We eliminated the pop-up and placed the prescribe portion within the main pane of the interface. 

Heuristic Evaluation

There were several fantastic points of feedback we received during the Heuristic Evaluation session, here we highlight the ones we felt were most useful and the corresponding design fixes to our interface.

...

Issue 4: No auto-complete when prescribing medications.
Design Fix: We implemented auto-complete fro the nonprescription.

Considered Design Alternatives

As we went through this project there were several alternative designs that we considered implementing. For a complete depiction of these, please see the GR2 section of this wiki which includes storyboards that accompany what we believed were our strongest designs. Of the proposed design alternatives the one we considered most strongly considered was a smart-phone style interface which was functionally very similar to what we have implemented in our design above with the exception that it did not contain the information sidebar and the patient menu, once clicked, expanded to occupy the entire screen. Ultimately we decided against this design because we felt it required far too much navigation and didn't allow the clinical staff as much access to information at a glance, which is highly important in a critical care context.

...