A five minute talk on interaction design in healthcare given at the Health Informatics Pulse (HIP) Meetup in Bethesda, MD on Thursday, October 21, 2010. http://www.meetup.com/HIP-DC/events/14713789/ http://www.youtube.com/user/Aquilent#p/u/13/JCyvJ14MY5Q

1. Every two weeks, or so, I donate platelets at CNMCH.

2. The design of the machine that collects my platelets is one
of the reasons why it’s easy to donate so often.

3. The platelet machine has a very simple, easy to understand,
interaction design.

4. Which I would call “dual-facing”, because while it’s
designed for the person managing the donation...

5. ...the interactions are easy for the donor to understand.

6. So the IxD faces the caregiver and the patient. Dual-facing.

7. While a platelet donation is not a simple procedure, I can
look at the machine and understand how I’m doing.

8. Every step is described with simple graphics and labels.

9. Which let me know everything I need to know about the
progress of the donation, and nothing more.

10. Now compare the software to the hardware. That’s a lot of
blood. Took a while to get used to looking at that.

11. And that’s a big centrifuge. Pretty overwhelming, which
seems typical of most medical device IxD.

12. I couldn’t tell you what this does. Would designing it so I
understand make it easier for the caregiver too?

13. If the device is in the room with the patient, do you think
they won’t try to understand what it does? They’ve got the
time.

14. Does my platelet machine need additional information? Of
course. But it doesn’t need to be dual-facing.

15. There is a lot of secondary information that is only for the
person managing the donation.

16. And this secondary information turns out to be a pretty
good indicator of problems with our IxD.

17. If someone puts the effort into adding this much
information, maybe there’s a problem with the initial design.

18. When people start adding this kind of information to our
machine, what did we miss?

19. Did we tell them where they are? Did we tell them what to
do next? Did we tell them what was about to happen?

20. Because if we didn’t, then they may not trust our design at
all. Do you think people still want to pump gas?

21. Did people know where they were supposed to sign before
someone fixed the design?

22. They did know where to place unwanted labels.

23. They didn’t know where more envelopes were, so someone
fixed it, and thanked the user for their patience.

24. They didn’t know that they could only use tens. So
someone fixed it.

25. They didn’t know they were on the 2nd floor, so someone
fixed it.

26. And that person fixing the design is often one of your users.
Here’s what one of mine told me, when I really blew it.

27. Your users will fix it for you, especially when you overwhelm
them with information.

28. Or when you leave critical information out.

29. So how do we avoid these problems in our own designs?
We’ve all made them. They’re easy problems to make.

30. Well, we have to listen to what the users want as much as
understand what our machines do.

31. And we, as designers, are not the users. We know too
much. We’re impostors.

32. So we really need to pay attention to what our users are
telling us about their tasks, about everything.

33. There’s a lot to know, a lot to understand. It’s hard not to
be intimidated.

34. But as you work at understanding what your users need,
you will begin to see relationships in the information.

35. And the relationships will start to flow, one into the next.

36. And your design solutions will start to emerge.

37. Sometimes the solutions will be complicated.

38. Sometimes they will be simple. Just enough to tell the user
what they need to know.

39. And nothing more.

40. So let’s get started, and pay attention. Because if we don’t
show the user what they understand.

41. Then, to the user, our designs will look like this.

42. Just before they look like this.