Design, research and evaluation of the TrueNTH system for the Movember Foundation and the mPOWEr medical system at the University of Washington
I have been working at the Clinical Informatics Research Group (CIRG) at the UW since Summer 2016. Starting as an unpaid intern I was hired as an assistant after the internship completed. The main projects I worked on were the TrueNTH system for the Movember Foundation and the mPOWEr medical system. My responsibilities cover a wide range, including testing, research, and design.
Prototyping and Design
During my internship, I have made many prototypes of different possible pages for different projects at CIRG at different levels of fidelity.
Low Fidelity
Pictured below is one of the low fidelity prototypes I made for a redesign of the health tracker in the TrueNTH system. I made this in Balsamiq to illustrate a possible way to introduce the user to their data. This prototype also had low-level functionality within some of the buttons which led to more pages of low fidelity prototypes. Doing this particular prototype added a new prototyping program to my skill set, as it was the first time I used Balsamiq. Since this point, I have utilized it for other projects both in my internship and in school.
The response I got from my coworkers for this particular prototype was very positive. They had only given me a loose framework, to redesign the symptom tracking entry page, and they were happy with the result I produced. There were a couple of features I included in the prototype that had not been considered by the team before and that they thought would be good additions to the site. While the current version of the site does not look exactly like my prototype it does share some similarities.
Medium Fidelity
One of the types of prototypes that I worked on was doing ‘previews’ of what updates to sites could look like. I made the medium fidelity prototype pictured below, and roughly seven others, to illustrate the effect of proposed changes to the Madison Clinic survey system on each page. The lead designer for our team requested for me to make these to show to the Madison Clinic to get their approval of the design changes.
Using the graphics softwares of Gimp and Inkscape I created this to the specifications given me using a base of existing screenshots of the site. After the prototypes were shown to the Madison Clinic the code was updated to reflect the modifications. These projects applied and built on the design skills and software skills I learned in HCDE 308.
High Fidelity
At the point at which I joined the CIRG team, our projects were far enough along that our high fidelity prototype was a live demo website as pictured above. My involvement with this level of prototyping was mainly with testing before updates were transferred over to the full site. My testing insured that when the updates are made that no bugs get through to the public site. My design work was mostly with design proposals for possible changes to the layout and if they were to be accepted they were handed off to a senior designer for finalization.
Research
The largest research project that I have worked on with CIRG was compiling a document of UX and UI best practices and how to apply them to our systems. My final research document covered the following topics:
Designing for Users with Disabilities
Autistic Spectrum Users
Deaf Users
Blind Users
Dyslexic Users
Low Vision Users
Motor Disabled Users
Screen Reader Users
Best practices for navigation
Horizontal vs vertical
Dropdowns
Universal Navigation
Emergency Exit
Hidden navigation
Duplicate links
Use of videos, particularly in “teaching” materials
Video usability
Short attention spans
Video Guidelines
Line length, font sizes for readability
Reading Online
Chunking
Readable Text for Older Adults
Use of images
Representing Users
Large Images
Survey best practices
Older users and surveys
Clear messaging
Keeping users informed
Real-world language
Web form design
Form Placeholders
Usability testing
Focus groups
Mind mapping
Test internationally
Testing content on Websites
Older Users
Virtual Healthcare
Senior Friendly Websites
Easy information access for older users
Links
Error Messages
Emails
UX Email Design
System Testing
One of my jobs with CIRG is finding bugs in systems and testing the fixes of those systems to ensure the bugs are gone. There were multiple types of testing that I would do on a regular basis and I discuss them in the following sections.
Test Matrixes
Weekly testing to catch bugs in the code for the various sites is one of the main forms of testing I did. Using test matrixes I would test the system by going through it in a variety of combinations to find bugs with either updates in the code or in infrequently seen edge cases. Using the test matrix ensures that all of the edge cases are gone through during testing and that there is a much lower chance that a bug will go unnoticed.
Update Testing
Another form of testing I would do was to test updates to the systems before they are released to the public site to ensure that the code fixes did, in fact, fix the bugs they are meant to. In addition, the testing catches any new bugs introduced by the code fix. This testing would be specific cases sent to me by various members of the team for me to test.
Accessibility Testing
One of the shorter projects I worked on during my internship was testing an iPad system for blind users. Over the course of one of my days in the office, I went through a system with the accessibility settings on to make sure the iPad text to voice system was able to properly interpret the site and the questionnaire system. My findings of this system test were that the questionnaire itself fit all of the design standards to enable its use by blind users. However, the iPad and Apple’s built-in system for blind accessibility were less than optimal.
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