I have consulted on a number of projects for the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, or DHMC. These projects have been great learning experiences for me. Unlike many organizations, DHMC is committed to user-centered design. I was given support for user research, both with resources and timelines. And most importantly, when it came time to make design decisions, user research was the guide.
The most interesting and challenging project that I did for DHMC was the design and usability for their Quality Reports feature. Quality Reports offers comparative data on how DMHC measures up across a variety of diseases, procedures, and cost comparisons. In 2003, DHMC was just beginning to plan for a rollout of this new and innovative feature. They wanted to provide the information in the best, most useful format possible. That’s where I came in—and where user-centered design played a key role.
The team at DHMC had several different elements in mind for presenting the reports: checkmarks indicating how DHMC was measuring against their quality goals; the data itself, and the comparison data; and explanations of the measures, so that readers would understand the significance of, for example, “aspirin at arrival.”
I developed several different functional mock-ups of the reports, each one combining the elements in different ways. I then did user testing to determine which approach resonated best with DHMC patients, looking for things like:
- Did people react to the information/visual density of the interface?
- Did they read the narrative text?
- Did they like having the comparative data?
- Did they like the checkmarks?
The most impactful thing we learned was that the scorecard approach, with only checkmarks, was too simplistic. Testing participants preferred access to the data and comprehensive descriptive information. Also, in examining quality reports, participants wanted to learn more generally about the conditions measured.
The interface for Quality Reports is a scorecard of sorts, but with data rather than checkmarks. Each measure includes a brief description, and is linked to a more complete description and data graph. Also, patients can access health information about conditions from the Quality Reports pages.
As of this writing, the designs I created for DHMC, including the home page, are still in use.
Sarah Horton 