An experience in poor design

I was in the doctor’s office recently, and I had the opportunity to watch the nurse enter information into the office’s new computer system.  It was a somewhat painful experience.  There was information missing from the last visit and when the nurse went to add a new (and rare) disease to the family history, she couldn’t because the system wouldn’t let her.  I saw the UI over the nurse’s shoulder, and it looked blocky and clunky.  On top of that, several nurses made comments about the new system, ranging from “I can’t get this to work” and “We aren’t as good with the system as we should be, but we’re getting better”.

I’m not blaming the nurses – I saw the system over their shoulders and didn’t like what I saw.  The system was clearly designed by developers who gave more thought into how they could design the user interface to easily meet the functional requirements than how the user interface could most easily meet the user requirements.  The result was a poorly utilized system that was lowering the morale of the staff.

How could the system designers have gotten around this?  System designers must start by getting a thorough understanding of what the end users need.  Not what they want, what they need.   Without this understanding, the designer is forced to make guesses as to what the user needs, and the designer (whether their official title is business stakeholder, developer, or a trained designer) usually guesses incorrectly.  How do we go about doing this?  To start, technologists need to know more about marketing.  In the long term, though, we need to have a better approach than just a generic marketing approach.  Luckily, user-centered design is becoming more and more accepted.  More on that in a future post.