No Joke.
Here's an example of a fairly typical User Preference Setting dialogs (with my annotations):
It's not always easy to find my way to the preference settings. They might be buried deep in a menu as "Options" or "Settings" or "Preferences". When I look at the options to check, it might be quite hard to understand what will happen if I check or uncheck an option.
Offer users more flexibility and the troubleshooting is more complicated, but if users' initial settings are not "just right", then the application won't behave as expected.
How can we empower the physician or nurse user?
How can the preference settings be made more understandable and accessible?
How can we help users have an experience that is "right for them"?
One way would be to place the preference settings closer to where they have an effect (see mock-up image below).
- Make the range of choices smaller (The Simplicity Principle of Usability).
- Make the range of choices "safer" (The Forgiveness Principle of Usability). Don't let me change things I might regret, and be unable to fix. Offer "personalization within guardrails".
- Put the choices close to the action ("Preservation of Context" and "Efficient Interactions" Principles of Usability).
I like to call this "just-in-time personalization".
It's that easy.
2 comments:
This seems almost hopeless to me! The system is just to far gone.
Why not sign-up for a free account with the Practice Fusion (web-based) EHR and see what we've been able to do with user interface issues of the sort you raise?
80% of the suggestions made by users of our system have been implemented into the EHR, so it is almost like a "community-developed" system at this point.
Thanks,
Glenn Laffel, MD, PhD
Sr. VP Clinical Affairs
Practice Fusion
www.practicefusion.com
Free, Web-based EHR
Very intriguing. I agree, context and proximity are paramount. Your idea reminds me of how the widget platforms like netvibes and iGoogle have a preferences function for each widget. I can't think of any other examples of applications that do something similar.
By the way, I like the mock-ups. It looks like you might be using balsamiq. I use that app and love it! It's the best software I've every used. I think it's a beautiful thing to employ a usable application to create other usable applications.
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