1) We encounter good and bad designs of everyday things we use in our lives. Provide two examples of good and bad designs from everyday life, including what you have experienced yourself and describe why they are good or bad designs. How could these designs be improved using design principles?
2) Explain what we mean by the term interaction design? Why is it important to understand users?
3) Usability can be broken down into a series of goals. Describe 2 or 3 of these goals and explain their applicability to health information technology.
4) The use of electronic medical records (EMR) has been shown to differentially affect clinical reasoning relative to paper charts. Briefly characterize the effects they have on reasoning, including those that persist after the clinician ceases to use the system. Speculate about the potential impact of EMRs on patient care. NOTE: WE HAVE NOT COVERED THIS MATERIAL AS OF YET
5) There is a range of usability evaluations used in both human computer interaction and human factors work. Characterize some of the factors or variables that distinguishes different types of evaluation. Briefly describe how you would employ three methods in the stepwise evaluation of a clinical system.
6) Metaphors are considered to be a central component of a conceptual model. Describe the advantages of employing metaphor for design in health care. Suggest a possible metaphor for guiding teenagers with Type 1 diabetes in adhering to treatment and lifestyle management regimens.
7) Interaction types (e.g., conversing) explains the ways users interact with an application or system. Employ (and explain) two interaction types in describing how you would design an app for young children with cancer with the goal of improving communication about their illness.
8) You’ve been tasked by a competitor to Epic to participate in designing the world’s best EHR. Specifically, you’ve been tasked with gathering data for the early stages of design. Consider two or three data-gathering methods and describe the advantages and disadvantages in this context.
9) You’ve been asked to join a team developing mobile tools for nurses in a pediatric intensive care unit. The project is just beginning and you have been asked to assemble a plan for characterizing the problem space and the conceptual space. Describe your plan.
10) Jakob Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation became a popular approach to expert-driven usability assessment. Describe the process of heuristic evaluation, its strengths and weaknesses and the ways to incorporate it into a user-centered design process. Give an example of how heuristic evaluation can be applied to a clinical domain.
11) A cognitive walkthrough (CW) is a tool for assessing the usability of a system and assigning causes to usability problems. Describe the principal assumptions of the CW. Briefly describe the steps involved in a walkthrough and how it can be used as a basis for coding user data.
12) Explain what is meant by AgileUX and how it may be deployed in developing tools for lower health literacy adults. NOT YET COVERED IN CLASS.
13) Describe the concept of mental models. Why is it an important concept in human-computer interaction as it pertains to design and user behavior?
14) How can we optimize the users’ interactions with a system so they support and extend users’ activities in effective, useful and usable ways
15) Describe some of the advantages of prototypes. What are some of the advantages and limitations of low fidelity prototypes?
16) What do we mean by a “walkup and use” technology? Should we design EHRs such that they resemble a walkup and use technology? Explain.
17) A friend of yours who is a developer health information technology suggests that the technology is rapidly becoming so advanced that there is no need to worry about usability or usability evaluation. Explain to her the value of usability evaluation and why it still matters.
18) Explain the concept of navigational complexity and why it matters in EHR use. What is the relationship between cognitive load and navigational complexity?
19) Explain the differences and advantages to the distributed cognition framework relative to conventional information processing.
20) What are some of the criteria for requirements analysis?