Media: Alertbox on Medical Unusability

Another goodie from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox is this piece on safety-critical usability. He reviews situations where saving a second can matter, then takes us through a study of medical usability, where an extra second's thought can matter because the design is so poor.

For instance, the study he's talking about brings up the issue of memory overload. Nielsen comments: 'At times, users had to review up to twenty screens to see all of a patient's medications. The well-known limits on human short-term memory make it impossible to remember everything across that many screens. In a survey, 72% of staff reported that they were often uncertain about medications and dosages because of the difficulties in reviewing a patient's total medications. Humans are notoriously poor at remembering exact information, and minimizing users' memory load has long been one of computing's top-ten usability heuristics. Facts should be restated when and where they're needed rather than requiring users to remember things from one screen to the next (let alone twenty screens down the road).'

Associated Link: Alertbox: Medical Usability - How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design

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