Evaluating the Usability of a Medical Care Monitoring Center System Using Heuristic Method

Abstract

Introduction: Simultaneously with the COVID -19 epidemic, many efforts were made to manage and treat the disease. One of the main activities was the development of health information systems to help monitor this disease, but due to the speed of the disease’s spread, there was not enough time to evaluate the usability of these systems. Therefore, the present research was conducted to evaluate the usability of the Medical Care Monitoring Center (MCMC) system . Method: In this cross -sectional descriptive study (2022), the usability of the MCMS system was evaluated using a heuristic evaluation method. The system’s usability was investigated based on the Nielsen’s usability principles. All the problems identified by evaluators were collected in a single list and the mean severity of each problem was calculated. Results: There were 41 usability problems. The lowest mismatch with usability principles was related to "Help and documentation" (n=1) and the highest one was related to "user control and freedom" (n=8) and "Match with real world" (n=7). In addition, most of the identified problems had a relatively high degree of severity and were placed in the category of major problems. Conclusion: Using the usability evaluation, a significant number of usability problems of the system were identified which, if not resolved, can cause increased errors, dissatisfaction, and decreased quality of information; therefore, it is necessary to solve these problems by the designers and developers of this system.