Medilinker -
Usability Study
As a part of the Masters course at University of Texas at Austin, we learnt the methods of Usability study and conducted a usability study on a health based application called Medilinker
My Responsibilities
-
Heuristic Evaluation
-
Competitive Analysis
-
Prototyping
-
Usability Testing
Project Details
-
Timeline : August 2021 - December 2021
-
Team size : 5 members
Project Understanding
Mission
Medilinker is a patient identity system created by the team at UT Dell Medical school whose aim is to have a central medical system which eliminates the need of physical documentation at clinics and hospitals.
Vision
To form an effective bridge between patients, clinics/hospitals and insurance companies which eliminates the need of physical medical documentation by having the patients identity registered one time on their system with their government ID.
Kick-off
The team at Dell Medical School kicked-off their project to the students with showcasing the medilinker project. The kickoff mainly focused on giving the students, what Medilinker is and what are their goals.
Medilinker is mainly based on creating a electronic medical record system that can replace the current medical system with the goal of replacing physical medical documentation. The presentation also highlighted how it used the state of the art technology like Blockchain system and its features.
Design Challenge
Our challenge was to understand how users felt about using Medilinker in their day to day life as a means of avoiding medical documentation. Based on the findings from the user tests we had to make recommendations for the team at Dell Medical on how to improve the user experience for their users.
Process
Affinity Diagram
Our team of 5 kicked off the project by creating an affinity diagram by understanding and addressing the goals of the project.
To understand the goals properly, we chalked an affinity diagram over Figma with questions and answers to increase the clarity. Few of the questions we asked were :
-
What are the problems this project is trying to solve?
-
How is this ‘job or task’ done today?
-
Who are our users and what characteristics make each user group unique?(i.e - do we have variations in age, technical skills, different frequency of appointments, Dr. visits, etc.)
-
Who are your competitors (Direct)?
-
Any analogous industries/technologies that are solving the same type of problem (i.e. digitally proving something is real, adding/sharing with others)?
-
Do the users understand the technology behind the working of Medilinker? (i.e. overview of Blockchain and what it can do)
Each of us took each of these questions and started answering and grouped the answers as per similarity and making a bigger umbrella for all the similar problems under it
Heuristic Evaluation
As an industry standard, we used Jakob Nielsen's principles to perform heuristic evaluation on the Medilinker application lo-fi designs. After the evaluation, our job was to provide a detailed feedback and report of the issues back to Dell Medical team. Our Evaluation was categorized into 4 levels with color code assigned to each.
Competitive Analysis
To perform competitive analysis of Medilinker we had to understand it's unique proposition offering. Medilinker acts as a electronic medical record system and a digital wallet at the same time. Thus competitive analysis to Medilinker can be grouped under three categories.
We had divided each of the competitors amongst our group members and I was responsible to do analysis for direct competitors like Salesforce Health cloud, Evernym and Apple Health.
The analysis was done by observing each screen and feature through every competitor's application and made a report of what each application does, how it's onboarding is, what are its unique features and how do each screen's user experience vary from Medilinker over Figma.
After each member completed this report over Figma, we built a grid which give a comprehensive overview of how Medilinker performs against competitors.
Click here to view full report
Prototyping
The motion prototypes were at first to explore how the interactions could work and flow through transitions, as well as to define the personality of the system.
Through this phase, I worked with my team where we divided different tasks of the application and distributed the work amongst team members. While there were 9 user tasks, I was responsible for the prototype of Tasks 3 and 4.
Task 3 Prototype
Task 4 Prototype
Screener, Moderator Script and Participant Packet
As a part of user research, it is essential to have the right audience for the user interview. It is very important that the UX researcher has the right screener built for the recruitment agencies to hire the right participants. We worked on building a mock screener which would hire participants from different age range, different medical visitation ranges, different technological understanding and other requirements.
We also worked on the moderator script where the moderator of the interview would have a script to read and walkthrough the participants through the interview and also built the participant script which consisted of guidelines and FAQ's for the participant and also consisted of likert scale questions to each of the tasks performed.
Click here to view full report
User Interviews
We conducted 1 pilot test and 10 user tests through the entire 9 tasks over Figma on Zoom calls due to COVID-19, to understand and receive user's feedback. The user's recruited were friends and family as it was part of the curriculum to learn user interviews.
Before conducting the interviews, as we were a team of 5, we first made an availability chart to make sure that the other project members were available to be available during the interview either as a notetaker or as an observer.
Each member of team conducted 2 interviews where in each interview, one team membered interviewed the participant and the other was the note taker.
After each task, the participant was immediately taken to a screen with a likert scale. The likert scale had a scale of 5 ratings.
-
Very difficult to perform the task
-
Difficult to perform the task
-
Moderate difficulty to perform the task
-
Easy to perform the task
-
Very easy to perform the task
Each of the participant's actions, reactions, ratings and feedback was taken by the notetaker in the interview. The notes were then collaborated together onto a spreadsheet to calculate the subjective rating and SUS score.
Findings
Each of the participant's actions, reactions, ratings and feedback was taken by the notetaker in the interview. The notes were then collaborated together onto a spreadsheet to calculate the subjective rating and SUS score.
3.00
3.45
3.64
3.82
As participants were asked to rank each task from 1 to 5 based on how difficult they feel when performing the task where 5 means very easy and 1 means very difficult, the most low likert average score where users faced most difficulties when performing the following tasks are below:
-
Task 5 Disconnect from the clinic
-
Task 6 Report an error
-
Task 9 Switch users
-
Task 3 Verify Credential
We also analyzed the SUS(System Usability Scale) to assess the overall usability measurement of Medilinker. The prototype of Medilinker has an overall average SUS score of 67.3, which is lower than the average acceptable SUS score of 68.
Based on the likert scores and the notes taken during each interview, we prepared an affinity diagram to understand and highlight which tasks and screens had issues. If more than 4 participants had issues with any task, we categorized it as high priority issue, if the more than 2 and less than 4 participants faced issues, then it was categorized as moderate priority issue and if less than 2 participants faced issue, it was categorized as low priority issue.
The Affinity diagram gave us an idea which are the regions of the app where users faced most difficulty. Based on those findings, our team prepared a complete usability report. My task was to research and understand findings from Task 3 and Task 4 and present them with issues, recommendations and customer quotes.
