Usability Flaws Research Articles

Impact of CPOE on doctor–nurse cooperation for the medication ordering and administration process

The objective of this study was to analyze the impact of medication ordering and administration functions of CPOE on doctor-nurse communications and cooperation. We performed an extensive analysis of the work situations in several departments of three different hospitals. One of the hospitals is still using paper-based orders, the second one is currently implementing a patient care information system (PCIS), but the analysis was carried out with paper-based orders. The third hospital has a PCIS installed with available medication ordering functions. We used standard methods from cognitive psychology to analyze physicians, and nurses' activity, communications and cooperation. This approach was combined with a usability analysis of both work systems, paper and computer-based. The paper-based situation is characterized by a synchronous cooperation with a distributed decision-making where physicians and nurses rely mostly on verbal communications to coordinate their actions; paper order sheets are weakly structured and poorly support the documentation task. In the computer situation, physicians and nurses work in an asynchronous mode, and leave to the system the coordination of their actions. Orders are exhaustively documented but some data may be misinterpreted. Some of these problems are due to usability flaws of the Human Computer Interface. We conclude with recommendations for usability improvement of CPOE systems, combined with recommendations for the organization of doctor-nurse communication when implementing such systems.

Lost in gallery space: A conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites

This article reports on a study which used results from 119 scenario–based evaluations of 36 museum Web sites to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites. It identifies 15 unique dimensions, grouped into five categories, that exemplify usability problems common to many museum Web sites. Each dimension is discussed in detail, and typical examples are provided, based on actual usability flaws observed during the evaluations. The availability of this conceptual framework will help the designers of museum Web sites improve the overall usability of museum Web sites in general.

Using peer tutoring in evaluating the usability of a physically interactive computer game with children

This paper presents a novel approach to usability evaluation with children called peer tutoring. Peer tutoring means that children teach other children to use the software that is evaluated. The basic philosophy behind this is to view software as a part of child's play, so that the teaching process is analogous to explaining the rules of a game such as hide and seek. If the software is easy to teach and learn, it is more likely that the amount of users increases in a social setting such as a school. The peer tutoring approach provides information about teachability and learnability of software and it also promotes communication in the test situation, compared to a test person communicating with an adult instructor. The approach has been applied to the development of a perceptually interactive user interface in QuiQui's Giant Bounce, a physically and vocally interactive computer game for 4–9 year old children. The results and experiences of using peer tutoring are promising and it has proved to be effective in detecting usability flaws and in improving the design of the game.

Expert systems as extensions of the human mind: A user oriented, holistic approach to the design of multiple reasoning system environments and interfaces

Expert systems have had little impact as computing artifacts. In this paper we argue that the reason for this stems from the underlying assumption of most builders of expert systems that an expert system needs to acquire information and to control the interaction between the human user and itself. We show that this assumption has serious linguistic and usability flaws which diminish the likelihood of producing socially acceptable expert systems. We propose a reversal of this paradigm, for the design of expert systems, by assuming that it is the human user who needs to acquire information and to control the interaction between themselves and the system.