Design

Final Design

Describe the final design of your interface. Illustrate with screenshots.

Important Design Decisions

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

Paper Prototyping

Heuristic Evaluation

User Testing

Considered Design Alternatives

Implementation

The EZ-ICU interface is designed to be a persistent, dynamic, client-side interface. Since we had no need for complex server-side logic or interfaces with other systems, we decided to create our entire application without a traditional backend. We chose the backbone.js library to handle data storage and the overal architecture of the program. Backbone allows us to be clear about specifying the models and views in our application, and allows persistence of those models. For testing purposes, we can use backbone to store patient information on the user's machine, using Local Storage, but backbone also supports synchronization to an external server, which might be necessary for future implementations of the project.

The primary advantage of this decision is that absence of a centralized server means there is one less component which can fail when users interact with our application. Users can note the administration of medication and see patient status, even when offline, and they are never stuck waiting for a server response or dealing with internal server errors. On the other hand, the local storage method means that users on different machines will have no way to see one another's data. Full implementation of backbone.js synchronization to a server would solve this problem.

This meant that all data about the current status of the patients in the ICU is stored locally within the user's br

Important design decisions for implementation.

Implementation problems which affected the usability of our interface.

Evaluation

To evaluate our platform, we interviewed three emergency care clinicians who were personal contacts of the group members. We believe that these users are representative of the target user population.We provided all users with a briefing and a set of tasks to be performed using our platform. This briefing is shown in the briefing section below. For each usability problem identified by the interviewee, we provide a severity rating and discussion of how this issue was address in the final implementation.

Briefings

User role 1: Doctor

You are a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital, and you are making your rounds in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). You move from patient to patient, analyzing their conditions, making appropriate diagnoses, and, when needed, prescribing appropriate medication based on the patients' status and treatment.

User role 2: Nurse

You are a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, and you too are making your rounds in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Like the doctors, you move from patient to patient. As a nurse, your focus is on checking vitals, monitoring patient condition, and administering prescribed medication and treatments.

Scenario Tasks

User Task 1: Doctor

You want to assess patient Mohammad and prescribe a medication
You need to prescribe 100mg Aspirin every hour for the next four hours
- You need to make sure that the patient is not already taking aspirin
- You need to remove any other medications that the patient is taking
- You need to ensure that the patient is not allergic to aspirin
You need to verify that the task was accomplished

User Task 2: Nurse

You want to check in on patient Kamran and determine if he has any upcoming medications
You need to administer the medication to the patient
You need to indicate that the medication was administered
You need to verify that the task was accomplished

Usability Tests

Below we show the results of our usability test on the three users, severity scores include: cosmetic, minor, major or catastrophic and are clearly denoted. For each usability issue identified, we discuss our implemented solution.