User Design for Ease of Use
Design for Your Target User
We navigate through life interacting with a variety of systems that have been designed by others. Most of the time these designs have been optimized to make our life easy and many are the results of years, sometimes even centuries of thinking and design input.
Some designs have a lasting impact; why are railroads 4 feet 8 1/2 inches wide famously linked albeit not a straight line or certainty to the width of the roman’s chariot wheels
But the new designs are hitting our screens and lives on a regular basis and in many cases come with some head-scratching decisions and fail miserably in the user’s hands. Products are launched and systems rolled out that seem clever and intuitive, right up until they arrive in the hands of the users.
In the current restrictive financial climate with a lot of belt-tightenings getting the design right through an iterative incremental process that includes many refinements is going to win out. This is especially important as companies race to launch their Minimum Viable Product (so-called MVP). While money was available, investors were frothy and people were willing to try new and innovative ideas you could get away with shabby designs that looked good but actually fell short in real-life trials at scale.
RecoveryOne
My recent interaction with RecoveryOne serves as a good example of these failings – a good idea in essence but in my experience poorly executed and filled with frustrating fails and gotchas.
I’ve been working through some mobility issues and working through some approaches to treatment that included extensive physiotherapy. My healthcare insurance covers a limited number of in-person sessions – in my case 10 which I completed at the end of last year. My experience with physiotherapy with patients had always seen a 1 on 1 relationship and focus but the new world we are in places a lot of pressure on our physiotherapists and in my sessions I watched the therapists manage 2, 3, and sometimes even 4 patients at a time. Not ideal but it was still a personal focus and each time I was there there would be guidance that was customized to my response and limits. A good example was the first time I was put on the exercise bike – my therapist quickly realized I was not able for that at the time and we stopped and moved to something else.
The early weeks were frustrating to me as I felt I was not making a lot of progress but I persisted and by the 8th, 9th and 10th session I was really feeling good about my recovery and progress. But the access was over and I had resigned myself to taking the exercises that we had worked on over the last several weeks and applying them myself to try and continue the progress.
Enter RecoveryOne – an online therapy program that my insurance carrier sent me a flyer for saying it was “free”. That word always bothers me as nothing is free – it may be “free” at the point of service (same as the United Kingdom’s NHS) but it is being paid for somewhere. In this case, it comes with no additional cost out of pocket so I am not required to make any co-pays or pay any cash out of my pocket. That makes signing up easy and I was delighted to have a new tool to try to work on continuing the steady progress I had made over the last 3 months.
Unfortunately, design challenges step in the way, and this morning ended in a pile of frustration for me. The system attempt sot guides you using the camera built into your iPhone or iPad and tracks your movements. But to be able to see the video showing you how to carry out the exercise and also keep time with the repetitions and sets you cannot be in the frame of the camera. Switching off the guidance system switches everything off and you are back to counting and doing everything on your own – what a shame as the metronome function and timer is actually helpful when keeping track of exercises.
But this morning the interface was insistent on interrupting my exercise program to ask a series of questions. I had set up all of my equipment and was wearing loose exercise clothing and focused on getting the exercises complete before I started my day but could not get past the questions.
I gave up and returned to my existing collection of physiotherapy exercises.
All I needed was an option to say skip. As I sit at my desk typing this, I’d be happy to answer the questions, equipped with a large computer screen, a keyboard, and a mouse.
Incremental Steps to Combat Poor Design
Involve Users – this seems obvious but those users can’t just be your designers who say this about how they use the product.
In the case of healthcare design, you need to involve the broadest range of users that the design is for – if this is aimed at the elderly you had better find a good panel of representative elderly people with all of their physical characteristics and challenges to simulate the difficulties of using the product or interface.
There are a number of tools and techniques to simulate user capabilities – think the suits are designed for someone to wear so they perceive the world like the elderly. The suit is weighted making movement difficult, it’s stiff so joints don’t move easily, it includes goggles that blur what you are seeing and ear protection that makes it difficult to hear.
