It was a pleasure to work with you, as you and your team made this process a more pleasant experience for our team and the participants.
Karen Perry
Usability Testing – Safety-enhanced Design evaluation for EHRs – usually involves observing users while they perform tasks with a hardware or software system, such as a desktop application, website or mobile phone app. The product may be a paper sketch, a wireframe, a storyboard, a display mock-up, a product in development, a working prototype, or a completed product. Usability Testing can also be conducted on competitive products to understand their strengths and weaknesses. A usability test can be a Formative Evaluation, which is conducted early in the design process in order to find potential problems and/or to improve the product, or a Summative evaluation, which is conducted towards the end of the project to validate the design against specific goals.
Summative evaluations for Safety-enhanced Design are required for ONC Certification for Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems (formerly Meaningful Use).
Usability Testing involves recruiting targeted users as test participants and asking those users to complete a set of tasks. An expert test facilitator conducts the testing via an established test protocol while the test sessions are recorded either by a video operator and/or an automated testing tool. Usability Testing should be conducted with participants who are representative of the real or potential users of the system. For some tests, users must have certain domain, product and application-specific knowledge and experience. Testing physician functions of an EHR, for example, with non-medical trained participants would not be appropriate or provide meaningful information.
Usability Testing typically consists of five primary phases:
The Usability People have available a custom state-of-the-art mobile usability testing suite that allows us to evaluate your product on site, or at any remote location (such as at a trade show or industry/customer meeting). We have found that conducting the usability test in close proximity to product stakeholders allows them to see the testing happen in "real time," and significantly facilitates participant recruiting. The Usability People have conducted hundreds of studies in many contexts. We the have expertise to help you understand your users and how they interact with your system. We do much more than just tell you what is wrong with your system.
Our usability reports provide a set of prioritized, detailed, and actionable feedback that you can take directly to your design and development teams for implementation.