Week 1 UX observation Journal

While working as a Physical Therapy Technician I often had to make use of the Raintree Electronic Health System to schedule and re-schedule patient appointments and update patient information according to the rapidly changing needs of their care plan. I observed several UX Heuristic violations that contributed to the Raintree Electronic Health system being frustratingly complicated and unwieldly to use.

1. Visibility of System Status

When performing certain high-stakes actions (such as collecting a payment from a patient, moving a patient's appointment to a different date, and updating a patient's insurance information) it is crucial that the user should be able to get appropriate feedback within a reasonable time so that they know what the computer is doing (for example so that they know the computer is in the process of completing the action the user requested). Without this feedback the user might suspect their input was not received and try again, thus resulting in very damaging actions like double-charging a patient or mismanaging the patient's information. This principle is called "Visibility of System Status" and Raintree EHR is very much guilty of violating this principle. When an action is in process, the only visual indicator is a very small swirly icon briefly appearing in the upper corner of the screen while the rest of the screen remains intact. This is an easily miss-able detail which can lead to user confusion.

2. Match Between System and Real World.

A good computer system should speak the users' language. It should words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than internal jargon. This UX principle is called "match Between System and Real World", and Raintree EHR also violates this principle because many of the buttons and menus use abbreviations unique to healthcare terminology and sometimes even different abbreviations than are found in any other EHR system. This is very confusing to new users and even for experienced users it increases the amount of things they must memorize and keep in their minds when using the system.

3. Error Prevention

The UX Heuristic principle of "Error Prevention" potentially covers a wide range of specific applications but all of them basically boil down to the idea of preventing the user from making inputs or performing actions which are clearly erroneous, especially when these erroneous inputs and actions could lead to harm. Raintree EHR actually does a good job of following this principle in most instances however there are some cases where it violates them. For example, when putting a patient on a waiting list we must enter a range of times and dates which they would desire to come in for an appointment. This is so that we can offer them that timeslot if it becomes available (like if the patient currently scheduled in that timeslot has to cancel). The Raintree EHR allows us to put patients in a waiting list for times that have already passed, which is impossible and thus can only be a mistaken entry. This is potentially damaging because then the patient will not be on the waitlist for the intended times.

All in all, I believe the Raintree EHR could definitely be improved in efficiency and usability by better following Heuristic principles.