Difference between revisions of "Interface Design for Health Care Environments: The Role of Cognitive Science"

Latest revision as of 04:16, 22 October 2015

These are the reviews for Vilma L. Patel and Andre W. Kushniruk's 1998 article for Interface Design for Health Care Environments: The Role of Cognitive Science.^[1]

First Review

Abstract

There are still a number of issues in designing effective user interfaces. The authors states that cognition plays a major role in the design of user interface along with other things such as information needs, work activities, and reasoning. The authors believe that there is still room for improving our understanding of human computer interaction.

Summary

In this paper, the authors discuss various different aspects of how cognitive science affect human-computer interaction. They talk about evaluating user interface by the use of "think aloud" protocols and video recording to evaluate a user's interaction on the computer screen. The authors also looked at why it is important to study individual and group interactions among clinicians and the differences between having the end user test a system's interface in a controlled environment compared to a real world environment. The paper also involves a discussion of the evolution of user interfaces. For instance, early user interfaces were strictly command-line interfaces such as UNIX and DOS. In the 80's, graphical user interfaces (GUI) were introduced. In more recent years, there were interactive user interfaces and network user interfaces.

Comments

The authors does a good job explaining why cognition has such a big impact on user interface designs. Even though this paper is a bit older, everything that the authors touches on is still valid. A well designed user interface for an electronic health records (EHR) should support the end user's cognitive capabilities. If an EHR has too much information on one screen or if the design is too complex, this can cause information overload. On the other hand, if information on the EHR is randomly spread out between multiple screens, this can break the mental workflow of the end user. The cognitive limitations and capabilities of the end user also plays a factor in designing an effective UI. With the constant development of technology and user interfaces, it is crucial to have new studies that keeps up with these changes.

Second Review

Introduction

The article delves into the unique challenges faced by both humans and computers in designing information systems and interfaces for healthcare. There are a myriad of issues evident, which most notably are in reasoning, decision-making process, and the sub-par design processes and features that fails to address the cognitive needs of users of these systems. The article emphasizes a key aspect of cognitive usability engineering and provides “fixes” and solutions to address these deficiencies.

Usability Engineering

Usability engineering addresses features that will incorporate:

• The ability to accomplish tasks in a safe, effective and hassle free manner,
• The ability to evaluate interfaces and systems while providing feedback,
• And the ability to be interactive while engaging the cognitive processes of end users.

Summary and Conclusion

The design of any healthcare interface should not be viewed as any design that goes into any application; designing healthcare interfaces involves system design and development methodologies and thorough testing of such interfaces that are backed by scientific principles but also appeals to an end users learning and cognitive capabilities.

Comments

The role cognition and cognitive science plays in user interfaces and information system for health care is important. While the changing nature of technology, it is necessary that healthcare interfaces are designed with features that encourage end-users to provide evaluation and feedback; and as such enables ease of navigating, understanding and sharing healthcare knowledge within and across systems and multiple healthcare domains. Incorporation of this feedback into an iterative design appears to be preferable over a fixed or rigid interface design.

Related Articles

A user-centered framework for designing health care interfaces

The preferences of users of electronic medical records in hospitals: quantifying the relative importance of barriers and facilitators of an innovation

References

1. ↑ Patel, V. L., & Kushniruk, A. W. (1998). Interface design for health care environments: the role of cognitive science. In Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium (p. 29). American Medical Informatics Association. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2232103/