Interaction Design - by the protocol : Combining user-centered design methods for finding user needs in a time-­‐constrained environment

Sammanfattning: ABSTRACT Today there are lots of different health care computer systems in use. However, according to recent studies many of them lack necessary usability. Within Nordic pediatric cancer care, analogue treatment protocols on paper are currently used, as a complement to the digital medical records and prescription systems. In these protocols, doctors and nurses note information regarding the patient’s treatment. Comments and changes are noted in the margin, which sometimes leads to making the protocol messy and difficult to grasp. Since several people are involved in the handling of the treatment protocols it occasionally happens that the protocol disappears for periods of time. We had two aims with this project. The first was to examine and map requirements for a usable interactive treatment plan for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL. The second was to investigate if our suggested combination of methods would be sufficient to acquire these requirements in a setting where the users, i.e. physicians, were time-­‐constrained.   Based on large variety of theories and methods from educational science and research in human computer interaction, we have conducted a qualitative study, iterating a combination of user-­‐centered design methods, with a revision of the requirements as well as the design following each iteration. The requirements analysis was performed in close collaboration with the doctors at the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden.   Our results indicate that by using a combination of methods from usability engineering and participatory design, a well-­‐defined list of requirements from the doctors could be identified which might be sufficient to develop an interactive prototype for a digital treatment protocol. In addition we found that our method enabled an exchange of knowledge between the designers and the users. In conclusion, these combined methods were suitable for enhancing the software designer’s understanding of the user needs in this time-­‐constrained environment.