Yesterday at Michigan State University, a group of like-minded designers and developers gathered at World Usability Day 2007 to discuss how to make software and web applications better for users.
Web usability as a serious issue that is ignored more often that not, and results in the web being plagued with horribly designed sites and applications. There are too many bad websites and web applications out there, and more are being created every day, because of the lack of focus on usability.
I was lucky enough to join the group in the morning and attend Jason Withrow’s presentation on Designing Usable Healthcare Web Applications. It became obvious early on that Jason is very experienced in this realm, and also that he takes the practice extremely seriously. In Jason’s world, usability is not just an added benefit that increases sales and page-views-per-visit (like my marketing world); it’s a life-or-death practice.
During Jason’s presentation, he ran through many examples of decisions that his team makes to help the user and make them more comfortable when they’re using the application (navigation structure, color choices, default landing page selection, etc).
He also touched on a number of absolutely critical items that can lead to catastrophe. One good example that he gave was printed reports. If a doctor or RN prints a report, and the printed version is separated onto two pages without any notation of it occurring, critical patient data could be left behind. This kind of developer oversight that can occur from not completely understanding the needs of the user could lead to patient mistreatment, or death.
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