For those of you that don’t already know, today is World Usability Day! Yes, indeed, an entire day dedicated to celebrating the joy of simple, easy to use interfaces that make our day-to-day lives easier and more manageable. This year’s focus is on the healthcare industry, which is even more exciting!
What, you aren’t jumping with joy? Well, let’s talk about usability and its role in healthcare and see if it puts you in a more celebratory mood.
Doctors, as we all know, don’t have a lot of time. They’re always busy, always on the move, and they see countless patients each and every day. The high demand and lowered supply of healthcare professionals coupled with the push to digital record keeping has given rise to the healthcare application as an industry all of its own. Which is great! Easy access to patient records, test results, chart data, and more right at a doctor’s fingertips means higher efficiency, lower costs, and happier doctors and patients alike, right? Right! But only if that access actually is easy.
Doctors, nurses, and other practitioners don’t have the time nor energy to be painstakingly sorting through oceans of buttons, links, and settings just to find the one thing they need right away. There’s no room for error, human or otherwise, when we’re talking about someone’s health – which in some cases is a life or death situation.
Healthcare is one of the few industries where poor usability affects not just the direct user of the app and its information, but also the receiver of that information. In essence, healthcare patients are secondary, or indirect, users of healthcare applications and their experience also matters.
You wouldn’t want to wait an extra hour for your doctor because they weren’t able to locate your e-chart, would you? And you certainly wouldn’t want to be given the incorrect diagnosis because your test results were buried in dust somewhere deep inside an application. Or to be given the wrong care, prescription, or prognosis just because the doctor’s tools were insufficiently laid out to meet his or her needs in any respect.
Healthcare applications need to work the first time, every time, in a way that is easy to use and understand at a glance. They need to be fast, accurate, stable, secure and intuitive. Not just for your doctor, but also for you.
So join with me and uTest in celebration of World Usability Day, not because usability is an amazing thing all around, but because good user experience really does affect our lives each and every day in a number of ways, and they should all be as great an experience as possible.
(Oh, and if you want our expert help making your user experiences the best they can be, take a peek at our brand new UX and Usability test offerings and our limited time usability testing discount.)