Personal Health Record - New Interface Structure

Overview

The online Personal Health Record (PHR) is a place for the consumers to store and organize their own health information or the care of a family member/friend.

PHR is currently implemented at Healtheon|WebMD site as MyHealthRecord, secure “electronic shoebox” for consumer to record, track and organize their personal health information.

The MHR is evolving into the single, central location where consumers participate in healthcare services and communicate with other healthcare entities. As a part of this project, and in effort to improve user experience, this MHR heuristic review was prepared.

Based on this review and on MHR heuristic evaluations previously conducted (MHR review prepared by Bruce Tognazzini, Family History review facilitated by Kivilcim Boztepe and Sara Sazegari), the attached key screen prototype was also implemented.

New proposed workspace design addresses critical problems identified below, should better support future PHR functionality, and should not require major engineering effort to implement. A prototype of the new design should be the basis for usability tests to further explore the workflow.

Most Critical Issues

Conceptual Design and Information Architecture

Problems:

• There is no sense of task flow
• Registration process is long and painful. During registration users have no sense of what they are creating and how their record will look like

Recommendations:

• Organize information to better support users’ work flow
• Make registration process easier. Ask users to fill in a minimum number of form fields required to create a record, present user with “empty” record and let them build it

Navigation and Support for Learning

Problems:

• Interface is not consistent in placement, labeling and meaning of controls
• Interface fails to clearly inform users about their position on a site and ways to get where they want to go
• When switching between family members’ records, it is not obvious to users who’s report is currently displayed
• Screens are unnecessary cluttered with controls and commands, making it hard for users to make choices quickly
• Navigation elements are spread across the screen, without clearly communicated basis for the division
• On-screen instructions are too wordy and not necessary helpful

Recommendations:

• Place screen actions in clear association to the information they control
• Make it clear to users at all times where they are on a site and who is the owner of the report currently displayed
• Use navigation menu consistently throughout the site
• Use more explicit labels for actions, and apply new terms consistently across all screens
• Use hyperlinks for navigating to locations and buttons for carrying out actions
• Reduce a number of controls appearing on each screen
• Minimize on-screen instructions

Visual design

Problems:

• Visual page elements are competing, making screens difficult to read
• Important tasks are not highlighted visually and are not given enough real estate. Advertisements are more prominent on the page than any other element. New features, such as Immunization Planner, are promoted just because they are new, diminishing the importance of other features (marketing confused with usability).

Recommendations:

• Simplify the visual look of the site, using colors and fonts which promote easy readability
• Arrange information on the screen into easy-to-scan layouts with sufficient white space
• Attract user attention to most important tasks by highlighting them visually
• Minimize use of imagery (i.e. maximize speed/performance)