The use of software applications in healthcare and medical devices has grown exponentially over the past decade. Medical software now plays a pivotal role in diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, managing records, and improving patient outcomes across the healthcare industry. These applications range from AI-assisted diagnostic platforms to wearable devices for remote patient monitoring.
Ensuring positive user experiences (UX) with medical software has become critical with this growth. Poorly designed interfaces can overload users with complex data, hide critical information, or require tedious workflows that introduce risks or frustration. Negative experiences ultimately impact patient health and safety outcomes.
Following UX best practices helps ensure medical software reduces risks and friction in healthcare workflows. This leads to better patient experiences and outcomes and widespread adoption of innovative health technologies. This guide provides the mindset and practical techniques to optimize the user experience.
Understanding User Experience
User experience refers to how users interact with and perceive a product or system. It encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s relationship with the medical software, including usability, accessibility, emotions evoked, and how well it meets user needs.
Key elements that comprise UX design for medical software include:
User Interactions
This refers to the workflows, touchpoints, and interfaces users utilize to complete tasks with the software. Interactions include data input/output, selections, results, information search, and hardware interfaces. The logical flow and ease of use of these interactions shape UX.
User Emotions
In addition to pure usability, UX design considers users’ emotions and satisfaction levels. Through interactions, well-designed medical software can inspire confidence, trust, and perceived intelligence. Poor UX can be frustrating or overwhelming for users.
Usability
The degree to which users can effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily achieve their goals determines software usability. Key aspects include learnability, efficiency, memorability, error prevention, and subjective satisfaction. High usability is foundational to positive UX.
Accessibility
Medical software should account for users’ varied capabilities and disabilities. UX design makes appropriate accommodations for vision, hearing, motor, and cognitive impairments to ensure equal access per ADA standards.
User Interface
This encompasses the graphical layout, information architecture, navigation, visual design, and interaction patterns. While UI and UX differ, the user interface facilitates interactions.
User Needs
UX design requires understanding functional and emotional user needs. User research, personas, use cases, and testing help uncover needs to address through UX, including overcoming limitations of current workflows.
Optimizing these areas for the primary user groups and using contexts shapes the overall UX with medical software. UX designers serve as the user’s advocate throughout the product development process.
Importance of UX Design for Medical Software
UX design plays a critical role in developing safe, effective medical software. Well-designed interfaces and experiences can profoundly impact patient health outcomes, quality of care, and adoption of health technologies.
Patient Health and Wellbeing
At its core, positive UX means avoiding harm and prioritizing patient well-being. Intuitive, error-resistant interfaces reduce mistakes during high-risk tasks like dosage calculations, data interpretation, diagnostics, etc. UX optimizations like alerts, wizards, and fail-safes create safer user workflows.
Avoiding Harm through Safe Designs
Following UX best practices mitigates use errors that lead to patient injury or complications. These include forcing functions, confirmation prompts, and safeguards for high-risk actions. UX design proactively identifies use risks through cognitive walkthroughs, risk analysis, and usability studies.
Accommodating Varied User Capabilities
Medical software serves users with diverse capabilities and backgrounds. UX design accounts for disability, age, education level, and technology experience. Users have distinct needs, requiring accommodations like assistive interfaces, simplified interactions, multi-modal feedback, and device interoperability.
Building User Trust and Adoption
Thoughtful UX makes systems more trustworthy and persuasive by representing data clearly, demonstrating value, and guiding users through workflows. This drives user buy-in and widespread adoption of software-enabled treatments and telehealth solutions.
Impacts on Patient Outcomes
Ultimately, UX optimizes the front-end use of medical software, which connects to the back-end impacts on patient health. Better data insights, care coordination, diagnostic accuracy, treatment compliance, and more translate to improved patient outcomes.
UX investment also reduces healthcare organizations’ re-development needs, training costs, and support burdens. Medical software delivers lasting benefits for all stakeholders when designed well the first time.
UX Design Process and Methodology
Creating positive user experiences requires a user-centered design process that engages end-users throughout medical software development. Key phases include:
Research
UX design starts with understanding the context of use through user research. This involves studying current workflows, pain points, clinical environments, and user needs through methods like interviews, surveys, field studies, and observations. Creating personas and user stories captures insights.
Conceptual Models
Initial concept models focus specifically on optimizing intended user interactions and workflows. These conceptual models, coupled with use cases, establish UX priorities early on when they have the most impact.
Interaction Design
With UX goals defined, the next phase lays out user tasks, UI flows, key screens, information architecture, navigation, and interactive elements. The aim is to craft intuitive interactions.
Rapid Prototyping
Transforming interaction concepts into testable prototypes is crucial for medical software UX. Rapid prototyping in modalities like wireframes, mockups, or interactive clicks allows designers to validate designs with users early and often.
Usability Testing
Prototypes then undergo usability studies with representatives of the target user groups. Moderated testing combined with metrics like time-on-task and satisfaction ratings uncover usability issues. Testing early in development allows significant UX changes.
Iteration
Feedback and observations from usability testing get incorporated into design iterations. As developers build towards higher-fidelity implementations, repeated testing refines the UX through measurable improvements.
Risk Analysis
Patient safety remains paramount, so hazard analysis techniques like healthcare FMEA supplement usability data to mitigate use risks. UX priorities shift to address high-severity use errors.
Comparison Testing
As the UX design matures, comparing usability studies against current workflows, competitive products, and clinical best practices measures improvements.
Finalization
The final UX undergoes confirmation usability and safety testing to validate designs before market release. This user-centered approach results in optimized medical software experiences.
Key UX Methods and Techniques
UX designers employ various methods to understand users, conceptualize designs, and validate interfaces. Core UX techniques include:
User Research
Ethnographic methods like contextual inquiries, shadowing, interviews, surveys, and focus groups provide qualitative insights into user needs. Techniques like task analysis provide quantitative data on workflows.
Personas
Composite profiles of primary user groups based on research to describe behaviors, motivations, environment, and abilities. Personas humanize target users throughout development.
Empathy Mapping
Visualizations detailing what users think, see, feel, say, hear, and do supplement personas for emotional understanding.
Storyboarding
Illustrating a sequence of interactions between a user and system captures intended workflows and touchpoints. Good for task-based scenarios.
Wireframing and Prototyping
Low and mid-fidelity representations of key interface layouts, functionality, and interactive flows. Enable simulation of UX for evaluation.
Information Architecture
Structuring, organizing, labeling, searching, and navigating content within an interface to optimize findability and usability.
Usability Heuristics
Established usability principles and guidelines for critiquing designs. These include error prevention, efficiency, memorability, consistency, feedback, and more.
Expert Reviews
Usability experts inspect interfaces against heuristics and guidelines to identify potential issues early without users. Supplements testing.
Usability Testing
Moderated studies with users on prototypes to capture performance metrics, feedback, and emotional responses across realistic scenarios. Remote moderated testing expands participant options.
These core techniques enable a scientific, evidence-based approach to optimizing the UX of medical software. The surface issues early to build interfaces that meet clinician and patient needs.
Special UX Considerations for Medical Software
While UX design fundamentals span domains, medical software poses unique requirements to address. Special considerations include:
Accommodating Disabilities
Applications must accommodate visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities per ADA and global accessibility standards. Tactics include interface magnification, screen readers, captions, keyboard-only operation, and assisting workflows.
Designing for Varied Education Levels
Literacy levels, medical knowledge, and tech-savviness differ greatly among the diverse users and operators of health software. UX should optimize for comprehension, provide definitions, limit medical jargon, offer guided explanations, and more.
Clear Communication and Feedback
Given the potentially serious consequences in healthcare, interactions need clear, unambiguous language to prevent misunderstandings. User notifications must get attention appropriately and guide the next actions.
Intuitive Data Inputs and Visualizations
Entering patient health data should use familiar interfaces and terminologies. Visualizing health metrics, risks, trends, and more should intuitively communicate often complex information to users without needing deep medical expertise.
Aesthetic Appeal and Visual Design
While focusing on usability, UX design considers aesthetic appeal and visual presentation appropriate to clinical environments. Visual design needs to be improved to maintain perceptions of quality software.
These examples demonstrate that UX needs are unique to medical software versus mainstream applications. Addressing these areas leads to safe, usable software and better clinician workflows.
Measuring and Validating UX
Proving the value of UX design requires measurable assessments using both usability metrics and clinical effectiveness criteria:
Usability Metrics
- Task Success Rate: Percentage of times a user completes a critical workflow in a scenario.
- Time-on-Task: The time to complete key tasks indicates efficiency. Longer times signal difficulty.
- Error Rate: Counting user errors and near misses during usability test tasks identifies areas for improvement.
- Subjective Satisfaction: User ratings of perceived usability and likability on standardized scales like SUS and NASA-TLX.
Clinical Effectiveness
- Patient Safety: Incidence of use errors or close calls during usability studies reveals potential patient safety issues.
- Clinical Guidelines Adherence: Expert reviews assess alignment with established medical best practices and protocols.
- Clinical Outcomes: Where possible, validate UX designs using health outcomes from clinical studies or simulations.
- Net Promoter Score: User likelihood to recommend the software to colleagues indicates perceived value.
By leveraging both usability and clinical performance data, UX practitioners demonstrate designs that meet both human factor and patient care objectives. Testing with representative users in realistic scenarios gives confidence in software use. Ongoing metrics cement UX’s role in better medical software.
UX Implementation and Guidelines
To scale UX across medical software teams, organizations should:
Create Interface Standards
Build a consistent visual language and component library for development teams to work from. This accelerates design and ensures familiar, branded experiences.
Publish UX Guidelines
Document interface patterns, best practices, style guides, and code samples for developers. Evolve guidelines as new interface conventions emerge.
Integrate UX into Lifecycles
Make UX design an integral, recurring phase in product development lifecycles rather than a one-off step. Build user validation checkpoints into major milestones.
Train Staff on UX Methods
Expand organizational UX maturity through education on user-centered design processes. Build empathy for users and skills in areas like usability testing.
Designing medical software and medical devices with the user experience in mind results in a product curated for the people operating it. In addition to being an FDA requirement, UX-friendly designs focus on patients and their well-being. Well-being and satisfaction are central to the user experience and should be reflected in all stages of development.
For unparalleled medical software UX design, partner with DeviceLab. Contact us today to leverage our expertise and ensure safe, efficient, and patient-centric solutions.
